The fight to protect end-to-end encryption is a never-ending one, and it’s seen some setbacks in recent months, most notably the passage in the U.K. of the Online Safety Act, which (theoretically, for now) empowers the government there to order communications providers like Signal or WhatsApp to bypass the strong encryption on their messages.
Well, here’s some good news for those who are keen on protecting their messages from prying eyes. The European Court of Human Rights said today that, while security services may want to decrypt some people’s communications to fight crime, weakening encryption for some people means weakening it for all—and that would violate human rights law (specifically, Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to privacy).
[…]
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“In so far as this legislation permits the public authorities to have access, on a generalized basis and without sufficient safeguards, to the content of electronic communications, it impairs the very essence of the right to respect for private life under Article 8 of the Convention,” the court concluded.
But the ruling also sings the praises of end-to-end encryption, noting that it protects freedom of expression and “appears to help citizens and businesses to defend themselves against abuses of information technologies, such as hacking, identity and personal data theft, fraud and the improper disclosure of confidential information.” A law obliging a communications provider to decrypt communications “risks amounting to a requirement that providers of such services weaken the encryption mechanism for all users.”
Same goes for the EU, where the European Commission was recently trying to do the same thing with a proposal aimed at fighting child sexual abuse material—EU lawmakers pushed back, leading to an ongoing deadlock, but again, the war over encryption seems destined to go on forever.
The European Commission has decided that Apple’s iMessage is not a “gatekeeper,” meaning it doesn’t have to abide by the strictest rules under the new Digital Markets Act—rules that include interoperability with rivals.
—The increase in Masayoshi Son’s net worth this year, according to Bloomberg, which attributes the SoftBank CEO’s wealth boost to Arm’s soaring stock price (which surged 90% since Wednesday last week, before falling 14% this morning).
Exclusive: Ex-Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and longtime Googler Clay Bavor raised $110 million to bring AI ‘agents’ to business, by Kylie Robison
The original article contains 1,182 words, the summary contains 261 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!