Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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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Why haven't private carriers emerged yet? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

All questions are in bold for ease of use.

The major carriers in the United States participate in NSA surveillance (except for T-Mobile apparently, because it's based outside of the US. Except they bought Sprint, which participates.) and that, along with other major privacy issues, means that the market for private carriers is incredibly slim. When I found out that some carriers, such as Mint Mobile, piggyback off of Verizon, I wondered: What's stopping a carrier from simply E2EE everything from Verizon, and then using Verizon to transfer the data? Obviously, the encrypted data could still be collected and sold, but it wouldn't matter if the encryption was setup properly, right? I'm looking to better understand how this works, and, if a solution exists, potentially be the first to make it happen. The reason I'm not suggesting creating a carrier without piggybacking is due to the sheer cost and lack of support it would have, which would lead to poor adoption. Also, if carriers simply don't support E2EE, couldn't carrier locked phones install the software (since most install software anyways) required to make E2EE work?

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 8 months ago (10 children)

You seem to be asking for telephone calls and SMS messages to be end-to-end encrypted. The underlying technologies were not designed with encryption in mind, so the only way for it to work would be for all the participants in a conversation to use an additional software layer. That was the method used by TextSecure.

The authors of TextSecure eventually figured out that a purpose-built Internet-based messaging protocol would be a better transport layer for secure messaging. If you're interested enough in secure messaging to be asking this question, you may be familiar with TextSecure's successor.

As for why a carrier wouldn't do this, I'll ask the inverse: why would they put in the effort when anyone who cares about secure communication just uses an encrypted messaging app?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Id put it this way. Until lack of encryption is an issue for carriers and not a source of revenue, there wont be an incentive.

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