Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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UK passes "online safety" bill making end-to-end encryption impossible (www.reuters.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

1 line below, you can read

Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible. Earlier this month, junior minister Stephen Parkinson appeared to concede ground, saying in parliament's upper chamber that Ofcom would only require them to scan content where "technically feasible". Donelan said in response to questions about Parkinson's statement that further work to develop the technology was needed but government-funded research had shown it was possible.

In practice, I doubt this will have any consequence on encryption, as the title of this post suggests.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Backdoors make it "technically feasible" to scan "e2ee". See, it's all a matter of perspective.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fucking doublespeak (not you). If you can scan it then it isn’t e2ee. Words mean things. E2ee means that the two parties are the only two who can read the message. If there is a way to do any analysis on the message at all then it isn’t e2ee.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

While I largely agree with you, technically it is still E2EE even if the encryption is very poor (e.g. hey look I shifted every character by one along the ASCII table).
Poor encryption could then be broken by a party in the middle.

All of that said this is a bit irrelevant, if the encryption is so poor the provider can break it at will, so can bad actors. We don't use broken (bad) encryption for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Companies also advertise e2ee while they generate and store the encryption keys on their server. So, it is encrypted all the way, but still easy enough to decrypt when needed. Very technically feasible and still strong against third parties.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

But they're not mandating such backdoors it seems.