The second involves more radical change: All companies would have to adopt and implement one universal encryption standard.Ĭonnecting to an open API could involve a company using a “bridge” that joins the two platforms together. The first involves tech companies allowing access to APIs that connect to their messaging services-this is the option Schwab and lawmakers are leaning toward. There are broadly two routes that could allow encryption to work across apps operated by different companies. “The main challenge is the trade-off between interoperability and privacy for gatekeepers who provide end-to-end encryption,” the team behind Matrix say. Matrix, a nonprofit that’s building an open source standard for encryption, has published multiple blog posts outlining how it believes the EU's proposals could work. Not everyone is against interoperability and end-to-end encryption. “I have a lot of concerns around whether this will break or severely undermine privacy, whether it'll break a lot of the safety work we've done that we're particularly proud of, and whether it'll actually lead to more innovation and competitiveness,” he said.Īpple did not respond to a request for comment about encryption but said it has general concerns that parts of the DMA will create “unnecessary privacy and security vulnerabilities.” Signal did not respond to a request for comment. In an interview with tech journalist Casey Newton, Cathcart said the move could cause misinformation problems and moderation issues for WhatsApp.
“Changes of this complexity risk turning a competitive and innovative industry into SMS or email, which is not secure and full of spam,” he says. “Making end-to-end encrypted messaging apps interoperable is technically challenging and creates real risks for privacy, safety, and innovation,” Will Cathcart, Meta’s head of WhatsApp, said in a statement. As a result, the largest messaging platforms-including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and iMessage, which the DMA designates as gatekeepers-will have to open up to rivals. Under the European Union’s wide-ranging Digital Markets Act (DMA), which European lawmakers approved last week and is expected to be implemented this year, the owners of messaging apps will be required to make them interoperable if another company requests that they do so.
If you use Signal and your friends only use WhatsApp, someone has to compromise. But it’s not possible to send a message from one encrypted app to another. Millions of people use iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal to chat with friends, family, and colleagues, and those conversations are all automatically protected by strong encryption. Sounds great, right? Well, we have some bad news.Įvery day, billions of messages are sent using end-to-end encryption. you’ll use to encrypt and decrypt messages sent between users of the service.The newest law designed to rein in Big Tech aims to make all your favorite messaging apps work seamlessly together. The private key can decrypt messages intended for you, and sign messages as yourself to send to others. The public key is used if you want to encrypt a message to someone, or verify a signed message from someone else. When you create a ProtonMail account, you’ll generate a new email address, and PGP keypair Refers to pair of keys made up of a public and private key that are used in public key cryptography. by default, with no action required on the part of the user. The most popular implementation of PGP is similarly named GPG. Messages sent from one ProtonMail user to another are PGP-encrypted Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP for short, is a standard for public key cryptography that is commonly used for sending and receiving encrypted emails. email messaging between ProtonMail accounts. Service providers don't have access to content when end-to-end encryption is applied. _ PROTONMAIL LOOKS AND BEHAVES similarly to traditional email services, but with a key difference - automatic end-to-end encrypted A method to scramble data such that only the sender and the intended recipient(s) have the ability to make content readable.