Yes. Yes it does.
No matter what you write, your communication bears inherent rights to privacy and security.
Whether to share “I love you” w/family, a steamy message w/your spouse, credentials w/your team, or your 💳 w/the kids for 🍕, encryption is as important as any right.
I understand that most people don’t fully grasp this, by simply saying “I don’t have anything to hide!”
But that’s not the fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem is that it’s not what you have to hide. It’s who you’re giving access to everything you’ve ever written and what they might do with it.
This isn’t a big deal when it’s just your letters that mean nothing to you, the type of thing that you wouldn’t mind seeing published in a history textbook or even a “collected writings” book someday….
But it’s a completely different story when it’s every single thing that you’ve ever written about anyone, every text, every word you’ve written, every single thing conversation you’ve had between you and your friends, family, spouse, etc that wasn’t face to face. We’re moving to a digital age where the thought that the letters we wrote our pals, our penpals, the love letters that we collected in shoeboxes just aren’t private anymore. And sure, you probably don’t mean this, but I grew up in an analog childhood, but with a digital adulthood and have DECADES of experience in cybersecurity.
The privacy policy of every AI company, the data protection policy of every smart home device (remember kids: the “S” in IoT stands for SECURITY!), the government actions supporting, protecting, defending or even preventing these companies from using your data as a tool against you is something EVER. SINGLE. ONE. OF. US. SHOULD. BE. CONCERNED. WITH!
End-to-End encryption matters. To you, to me, and to everyone.
Rule of thumb: if it matters to “the government”, to the military, to the biggest companies/corporations, then it should probably matter to you.
You have a fundamental right to an expectation of privacy. Nobody should have the ability to access your personal communications.
Use
@signalapp
Use iMessage (
@Apple)
Use
@element_hq (Matrix)
If you absolutely must, use
@telegram (no offense, it just not out of the box!)
And it’s incredibly easy to use encrypted email even on top of
@gmail and others using
@mailvelope and
@FlowCrypt (GPG/PGP for encrypted email on top of Gmail or
@Outlook)