Encryption Has Never Been More Essential—or Threatened
Five years ago today, WhatsApp completed our roll out of end-to-end encryption, which provides people all over the world with the ability to communicate privately and securely. This was a technical achievement decades in the making, a vision first imagined by Stanford mathematicians Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman, who in 1975 developed the underlying cryptography we rely on today.
In the past five years, WhatsApp has securely delivered over 100 trillion messages to over 2 billion users. During the height of the global pandemic lockdown, end-to-end encryption protected people’s most personal thoughts when it was impossible to come together in person.
End-to-end encryption is now the way most messages are sent globally. Much as you might expect this technology to always secure our personal communications, we cannot take end-to-end encryption for granted. There remains serious pressure to take it away. Elected officials in Europe have recently called for companies to build ways to break into their own encryption. In India, regulators have published new rules for messaging services that would undermine people’s ability to have a private conversation. Brazil’s Supreme Court may soon decide whether the government can shut off encrypted messaging services, in a case that started after a Facebook executive was arrested for not providing police with messages we could not access. Any of these steps could alter the course of the internet at a time when people need strong security more than ever.
