14 DAY TRIAL // It’s not just the US politicians that are annoyed with Google and Apple’s desire to keep people’s privacy safe, but also those in the European Union.
Troels Oerting, the chief of the European Cybercrime Centre and the Europol Assistant Director, says that people don’t know the difference between privacy and anonymity. In an effort to get the former, the latter makes life easier for criminals, he stated.
“The problem right now is, that there seems to be a confusion between anonymity and privacy. We all want and need privacy, but this doesn’t mean anonymity,” he said, The Register reports.
While he didn’t specifically refer Google and Apple’s implementation of encryption on their mobile operating systems as a reaction to the revelations regarding the mass surveillance apparatus going on in the world with the help of the NSA and its partners, he did refer to encryption.
“Irreversible encryption will make it very difficult – maybe even impossible – for law enforcement to obtain evidence and I am not sure this reality is clear to all,” he said, adding that in any democratic society there’s a need to provide law enforcement with a right to obtain information authorized by a judge, based on clear suspicion in cases involving serious crime or terrorism.
Oerting believes that full encryption of communication and online storage will make life easier for criminals and terrorists and very difficult for the rest of the world. He called for the discovery of the right balance between security and freedom, which must be set by citizens in a political and ethical discussion on the trade-offs.
The FBI set the trend
FBI Director James Comey started the wave of protests regarding the plans to encrypt all phone communications on both Android and iOS devices, which would protect the data from law enforcement even when a court order is served because not even the companies can read the information and therefore have nothing to hand over.
Eric Holder, outgoing US Attorney General, talked about the same topic and played the “think of the children” card, saying that the encryption settings on one’s phone could be used by child predators to evade authorities.
It remains to be seen whether Google and Apple will budge on the topic, especially since encryption has become more and more popular over the past year since the NSA revelations since hit the media, thanks to Edward Snowden.
The whistleblower himself has been saying that encryption is the only way to dodge the ever watching eye of the NSA and its partners that like to collect all data available.