Barr Pushes Facebook for Access to WhatsApp Messages [View all]

[ancianita]

Last edited Fri Oct 4, 2019, 10:45 AM - Edit history (1)

Source: New York Times

Companies should not deliberately design their systems to preclude any form of access to content even for preventing or investigating the most serious crimes,” Mr. Barr, joined by his British and Australian counterparts, wrote in a letter to Mr. Zuckerberg that was reviewed by The New York Times and dated Friday. BuzzFeed News first reported on the letter.

Tech company officials have said that strong encryption is necessary to protect legitimate users of their platforms all over the world, including journalists and government critics. Facebook respects the role of law enforcement but believes people have a right to communicate privately online, said Andy Stone, a company spokesman.

“End-to-end encryption already protects the messages of over a billion people every day,” Mr. Stone said. “We strongly oppose government attempts to build back doors because they would undermine the privacy and security of people everywhere.”

With 1.5 billion users, Facebook’s WhatsApp is perhaps the world’s most commonly used encrypted communications platform. Privacy experts and tech company officials said that creating a back door would effectively destroy the secrecy of such platforms.



Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/03/us/politics/barr-whatsapp-facebook-encryption.html

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This article is on today's front page, above the fold.

Re Barr and allies' move, I prefer the word privacy to describe what tech is trying to protect, not "secrecy."

This could be the new globalism of government that Trump fecklessly tries to set up, along with the corporatists. It's one thing for big data to be drawn from our social media accounts, but it's another to be constantly surveilled by multiple governments.

Maybe it's not just Barr; maybe it's really that the Big Servers of central banks and finance want to keep scraping data from social media. Or both.

It's hard not to feel like a host to global parasites at this point. Hard to see where the dinosaurs (or elephants) are headed while we keep from being trampled.