Imagine, everyone on the planet has access to internet beamed from the sky; billions have ultra-fast access though 6G mobile networks. The network is everywhere. One trillion connected sensors in cars, homes, factories, streets and highways monitor everything from our vital signs to air pollution and goods moving through supply chains. Every data point is recorded, analyzed, combined, and used to make near instantaneous, automated decisions.
Welcome to 2036, a world where privacy is dead—unless the protection of privacy becomes a core principle in the design and use of these technologies. Last month, Amnesty International released its ranking of 11 companies on their key policies and practices related to encryption and human rights. We ranked the companies behind the world’s most popular instant messaging apps and rated them on how they recognize risks to privacy and freedom of expression, how they mitigate against these risks through the use of encryption and how they communicate thee risks to their users.
Central to our ranking is whether companies are using end-to-end encryption in their apps. This is a method that scrambles information sent between the sender and the recipient so that only you and the friends, family and co-workers you communicate with, can read it. With end-to-end encryption, even the companies running the apps cannot read the communication.
