Facebook is frequently in the headlines, but few controversies linked to the social networking giant have attracted as much high-level government interest as its plans announced earlier this year to encrypt the messages sent by users.
The proposals have raised concerns with the United States attorney general, William Barr, the British home secretary, Priti Patel, and the Australian home affairs minister, Peter Dutton.
Along with another US politician, the then acting homeland security secretary, Kevin McAleenan, these officials recently signed a letter calling on Facebook to delay its encryption plans.
Authorities have voiced concern that terrorists will be able to communicate with one another without their messages being accessible to law enforcement agencies.
Facebook messages have frequently sparked automatic alerts over the possible spread of child-abuse images, and the fear is that, with encryption, such illegal images will be spread more widely and the authorities will find it harder to detect them.
Governments are particularly worried because of Facebook’s huge market presence, with the social network having 2.45 billion users.
Announced in March by Facebook’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, the encryption plans are seen by some as the company’s response to recent controversies over privacy and the use of user data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal particular may help to explain Facebook’s actions.
But if Facebook does start to use end-to-end encryption by default, it will not be the only company to do so.
Indeed, analysts have suggested that the fact that some rival messaging services already encrypt messages may have pushed Facebook to do the same.
As well as WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook and has 1.6 billion users, other messaging services already using end-to-end encryption include Telegram and Signal, both of which are seeing their popularity grow.
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Esta historia es de la edición December 2019 de Security Advisor Middle East.
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