Celebrating Global Encryption Day

You are living in the golden age of encryption.

Internet-connected digital devices are—if misused—infrastructure that can enable total mass surveillance of billions of people. The device that you are using to read this is likely capable of watching you, listening to you, and live-tracking your exact position on earth via a network of satellites. Every message, every phone call, every facetime with your friends could theoretically be watched by an audience who has no right to do so.

A rag-tag coalition of punks, geeks, and ferocious activists (A.K.A the privacy community) are the thin line that protects us from mass surveillance. Encryption is core to this mission, and without it, every piece of personal information stored on your device or whizzing around the world wide web would be completely vulnerable.

This vital technology is being utilised at a greater rate today than ever before in history. In the context of communication especially, our data is more protected now than it has ever been. Apps like Session are pushing the technological boundaries of secure messaging, and other messaging applications which until recently provided paltry privacy protection to their users now offer end-to-end encryption by default.

Since WhatsApp’s implementation of end-to-end encryption in 2016 and Facebook Messenger following suit earlier this year, three billion people who previously did not have basic privacy in their online conversations are now protected. The significance of these kinds of hard-fought victories by the privacy community cannot be overstated, and the number of conversations which have been secured cannot be calculated.

But not everybody agrees that respecting the right to private conversations is a good thing. Many organisations work in direct opposition to that goal, and legislation which seeks to undermine end-to-end encryption is challenging people's right to privacy in most corners of the globe.

You are living in the golden age of encryption. Never before has so much intimate information been created and catalogued about so many, and because of encryption, this information is protected. But we cannot afford to take what we have achieved for granted.