Amnesty International assessed 11 companies with the most popular messaging apps based on their use of encryption to protect users’ privacy. They highlighted that end-to-end encryption should be a minimum requirement for technology companies to ensure privacy. End-to-end encryption is considered secure because only the sender and receiver in a conversation can read the messages. It does this by scrambling data and blocking anyone who attempts to intercept.
Facebook scored the highest with 73 out of 100 for Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which have 2 billion users combined. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption as a default and Facebook Messenger recently rolled out “Secret Conversations” mode which uses the encryption as well. However, Facebook Messenger does not encrypt messages normally, when it is not in the “Secret Conversations” mode.
Apple scored second-highest with 67 out of 100 because it provides encryption on iMessage and Facetime. Amnesty International noted that the company needs to do more to ensure their users that using iMessages is more secure than using SMS messages.
Snapchat, Skype and Blackberry Messenger scored very low on this rankings report. Currently, Snapchat and Skype do not have any form of encryption in their apps. Blackberry Messenger only offers end-to-end encryption as a paid service for their app.
View the report below for a comparison of the companies assessed by Amnesty International:
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