Apple could soon find itself in a position where it might have strong reinforcements in its war with the FBI. From what we have learned, Google, Facebook, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, are all planning to expand their encryption services.
According to a report from the Guardian, citing an unnamed source, the above companies are working hard to increase encryption in their respective messaging apps. This is clear defiant move to the FBI and the federal government bid to pressure Apple into tearing down the iPhone's security.
The report went on to state that interest in encryption is infiltrating at Google. Employees at the company are wondering if the encryption technology behind End to End is possible in other products. Nothing concrete has been made, but we're certain folks at the company are working on it.
Back in 2014, Google unveiled that it has been working on an end to end email encryption tech in collaboration with Yahoo. However, things failed to take off due to the fact that parts of Google's business model include the scanning of email contents for the purpose of advertising.
WhatsApp, however, is the service that is generating more buzz, and that is mainly because the service is used worldwide and has over 1 billion registrants. Not only would extending encryption make it difficult for the FBI to gain access to WhatsApp data, but the same would happen to other police agencies around the world.
Over the past couple of months, smaller chat rivals such as Signal, Wickr, Wire, and Telegram, have all gotten a boost due to offering end-to-end encryption and other key security features. If the bigger boys fail to keep up, they could lose users in the thousands.
If it isn't clear how far police agencies are willing to go to get what they want, then let is direct everyone to the Facebook executive who was recently arrested in Brazil because he was unable to supply certain information. Fortune reported that the man was actually jailed, but was then released not too long after.
This is clear sign that police agencies are at war to gain access to our data, and we must stand to protect it.