Encryption is a vital tool for protecting ourselves in a digital society. Yet governments are increasingly trying to undermine this valuable tool, putting us all in danger.
From when we wake up in the morning to when we go to bed at night, we rely on encryption every day. It safeguards the personal security of billions of people around the world and the national security of countries everywhere. Whether it’s our private messages, online banking, air traffic control, medical data, or e-voting, our online information must be protected against eavesdropping and tampering.
We’re working across the globe to protect encryption by helping policymakers understand proposals that could jeopardize our security online.
Encryption is the process of scrambling or enciphering information so it can be understood only by someone with the means to return it to its original state. It protects the confidentiality of stored or transmitted data by making it unintelligible: a third party might still gain access to the data, but would not be able to make sense of it. Some forms of encryption, such as secure web browsing, only protect the data while it is being transmitted: on the website and in your browser, the information is unencrypted. Other forms of encryption, such as secure messaging, keep protecting the data until the recipient opens the message – even if that is days or weeks after it arrives.
When messages are encrypted even when handled by intermediaries (such as a messaging server) and are only readable by the sender and receiver, we refer to that as “end-to-end” encryption. End-to-end encryption protects data regardless of the protocols used to transmit it, whereas web browsing relies on secure communications protocols for its encryption.
To keep the Internet strong, we’re:
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