14 DAY TRIAL // Google is going to participate in a meeting with the British government this week, a meeting that seems to have been sparked by the terror attack that took place in London last week.
The meeting will likely focus on the advantages and disadvantages of offering end-to-end encryption to users, something that British authorities have been quite vocal about these past few days, especially as they slammed WhatsApp for not providing them with the last messages sent out by the author of the attack, something that is impossible due to the same encryption featured in the messaging app.
For its part, Google will also be scolded over the extremist material accessible through its search engine, and even on YouTube.
Google has confirmed to Business Insider that it is among the companies that will participate in this meeting with the British government, although it declined to comment further. Although not confirmed, as of yet, Facebook will probably be on the same list of participants, along with Yahoo and even Apple.
"There should be no place for terrorists to hide," Home Secretary Amber Rudd said in regards to the terrorist incident, and more specifically, to the fact that encryption helped hide the terrorist's last sent messages.
The never-ending discussion over encryption
There are many messaging apps that provide end-to-end encryption, including Google's Allo, Apple's iMessage, and many others from other companies.
This, of course, is the perpetual discussion over whether or not people should be allowed to have complete privacy of their communications via end-to-end encryption. Security experts and tech companies say "yes," while authorities and politicians say "no" due to the "inconvenience" of being unable to decrypt these conversations. In fact, on numerous occasions, people who have been put in positions of power, in the United States and Europe alike, have called for encryption backdoors to be used by law enforcement. This, however, would make billions of users vulnerable to hackers and government surveillance.