- Aug 17, 2017
- 1,609
The partnership between law enforcement and the technology industry is “at risk” due to end-to-end encryption, warned a joint declaration on Sunday from European police chiefs.
Although the company was not named in the statement, it follows social media giant Meta announcing in December that it had begun rolling out the technology as default across “all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook.”
End-to-end encryption is a way of designing communications so that the encryption is applied and disapplied by the end devices, making it impossible for the service or network provider — or any hackers accessing the network — to read the contents of messages.
The move by Meta was welcomed by privacy campaigners, however law enforcement agencies had long warned that this lack of access would undermine their work tackling online harms, particularly child sexual exploitation.
Police warn partnership with tech industry ‘at risk’ over end-to-end encryption
A joint declaration from European police chiefs does not mention Meta by name, but just a few months ago the company began rolling out the technology as default across “all personal chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook.”
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