Only 1 in 250 understand role of encryption in securing messaging: Study
Only one in 250 people understood how end-to-end encryption secures
the privacy of their chats on messaging apps and are willing to pay some amount
to protect their conversations, a study has found.
"Understanding Consumers Perspective on Encryption in
India," by Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS International), had
2,113 respondents aged between 18 and 65.
All respondents-- an almost equal number of males and
females--used WhatsApp, 20 per cent used Telegram, 8 per cent used iMessage, 2
per cent used Signal, 1 per cent used Viber, and 2 per cent used Line. People
are willing to pay Re 1 per day, on an average, to secure their conversations,
said the study.
Encryption is
the practice of scrambling data to make it unintelligible for even the service
providers. It keeps conversations private but has equally been abused for the
spread of fake news and criminal activity. Technologists and privacy experts
have always argued that breaking encryption is the first step towards
government surveillance on its own citizens.
The new social media rules, notified by the government last month,
also ask platforms like WhatsApp to identify
the originator of content. Even though IT minister Ravi Shanker Prasad said the
government would only want intermediaries to identify the originator and not
the content of problematic messages, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has earlier
said that attributing messages on the platform would undermine the end-to-end
encryption, and its private nature, leading to possibilities of being misused.
As many as 45 per cent respondents claimed to have wondered
whether instant messaging service providers can access their messages, while 75
per cent of the respondents perceived the likelihood of unintended recipients
accessing their chats increased by 75 per cent, if end-to-end (E2E) encryption
is removed.
However, even though all the respondents were WhatsApp users, which
swears by its end to end encryption, only 61 per cent of the respondents
believed that their chats are end to end encrypted.
Respondents perceived privacy as the third most important benefit
of using instant messaging services. Ease or convenience of use and the option
of sending audio, video, GIFs and other forms of content on chat were the first
two reasons.
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