Data Security: Tech Businesses Adopt Encryption to Avoid Government Requests

Free email.  Free chat.  Free online storage.  Consumers have had a lot of free online services available.  But the tradeoff is that the information was also available to the vendor hosting or enabling the free use of that data.  Business like Google, Facebook and Microsoft have learned who you are and what you do, and most of all, how best to present advertising to you.  It’s the revenues that these companies generate from advertising after all that enable them to offer up free services.

But increasingly government agencies are trying to get access to the troves of data collected or managed by these companies.  There has been increasing publicity of cases where businesses have been asked to provide the government information.  Whether they have cooperate or resist, there are often legal fees and unwanted publicity.

On the defense, many businesses are deciding that the best option for them is to keep access to as little as possible of the information which pass through their services.  They see encryption as a way for them to extract themselves from legal problems.  If data is encrypted by the customer using keys not available to the service provider, the service provider would then no longer control access to sensitive information and be the target of government demands.  This would include securing services like storage, email and chat with encryption.

Larry Gadea, founder and chief executive of Envoy, said that “we have to keep as little [information] as possible so that even if the government or some other entity wanted access to it, we’d be able to say that we don’t have it… For a small startup trying to iterate quickly, it definitely slows things down.  But in the long run, it’s a competitive advantage and it reduces risk on our company. I can sleep better at night.”

Facebook’s WhatsApp, the Viper messaging app in Europe, Cloudera and Box have all added end-to-end encryption options that enable customers alone to be able to access data that is stored and transmitted with these services.

Marc Andreessen in a recent interview with the Washington Post, said that “engineers are not inherently anti-government, but they are becoming radicalized, because they believe that the FBI, in particular, and the U.S. government, more broadly, wants to outlaw encryption.”