Why do we care about end-to-end encryption

Question

In the last few years phones and apps have been touting themselves as better than other phones/services because their messaging has end-to-end encryption, or some other variant of secure messaging. Why do we care?

Edit: Thanks for the answers, everyone!

In: 140

Answer 1

Let’s say you have two mailmen in your neighbourhood, delivering mail to all residents of the area.

You have a secret love letter that you wish to send to your crush who lives on the opposite side of town. You don’t want anyone to know of this crush of yours, so you need to trust whomever you’re handing the letter over to, right?

As it so happens, one of the two mailmen is known for opening the mail he gets, reads them, and even likes to gossip about what he finds whenever he’s in the bar, in the grocery store and to all the shop owners at the local shopping mall.

Sometimes he even gets paid by store owners to reveal secrets in the letters he’s been entrusted with, in hopes of getting to know just what brand of cheese and shoes and dildo sizes the people who sent said mail prefer.

This mailman has even gone to the police sometimes with his mail, revealing the most dirty little secrets of the town’s residents.

But there’s also another mailman in town, who is known for never opening any mail, and always delivers all letters untampered with directly to the intended recipient. In fact, this mailman even locks the letters he is delivering in a special box, that the recipient needs a special code for to be able to open.

So when this mailman collects a letter, he instructs the sender to place the letter inside the box and set a secret code on it so that the mailman can’t open it to see what’s inside.

When the mailman has left the sender’s house with the now locked box, and given that the phone lines in this metaphorical town are completely private and safe, the sender then calls up the recipient and tells them the secret code they need to be able to open the box.

When the honest mailman arrives at the recipient’s house, he hands over the box that he can’t open, but that the recipient now can.

The box is opened and the crush can now read your secret love letter knowing that nobody has eavesdropped on it while it was in transit.