Law Professor: Tech Companies Are Our Best Hope At Resisting Surveillance

An anonymous reader writes: Fusion has an op-ed where Ryan Calo, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Washington, argues Google, Apple, and Microsoft pushing back against government surveillance may be our only real hope for privacy. He writes: "Both Google and Yahoo have announced that they are working on end-to-end encryption in email. Facebook established its service on a Tor hidden services site, so that users can access the social network without being monitored by those with access to network traffic. Outside of product design, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have sent their formidable legal teams to court to block or narrow requests for user information. Encryption tools have traditionally been unwieldy and difficult to use; massive companies turning their attention to better and simpler design, and use by default, could be a game changer. Privacy will no longer be accessible only to tech-savvy users, and it will mean that those who do use encryption will no longer stick out like sore thumbs, their rare use of hard-to-use tools making them a target."

Comments

Re:Or the Gordon Dickson approach

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a special government program going on in the US right now where for $0.49 a uniformed representative of the government will hand deliver your sealed correspondence to its destination.

I find this to be a useful way to communicate and do business in the Digital Age.

Re:No

[Sloppy]

Communication is too basic to not be a commodity. If you have a software "vendor" then you're doing it wrong.

What is really getting fucked up here, is that we are using the names of these three companies in our discussion, rather than the names of standard protocols. Because the public isn't using standard protocols. That's intolerable.