Interesting and thought-provoking essay by Bruce Schneier on his blog earlier this week. Here are the final few paragraphs:
- Schneier on Security: Ephemeral Apps
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/ephemeral_apps.html
... Of course, the typical Snapchat user doesn't care whether the U.S. government is monitoring his conversations. He's more concerned about his high school friends and his parents. But if these platforms are insecure, it's not just the NSA that one should worry about.
Dissidents in the Ukraine and elsewhere need security, and if they rely on ephemeral apps, they need to know that their own governments aren't saving copies of their chats. And even U.S. high school students need to know that their photos won't be surreptitiously saved and used against them years later.
The need for ephemeral conversation isn't some weird privacy fetish or the exclusive purview of criminals with something to hide. It represents a basic need for human privacy, and something every one of us had as a matter of course before the invention of microphones and recording devices.
We need ephemeral apps, but we need credible assurances from the companies that they are actually secure and credible assurances from the government that they won't be subverted.
I can certainly see a need for ephemeral, non-recordable, encrypted chat and encrypted phone-calls ...