Strong encryption helps protect your personal data when it is under attack

Hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated, targeting our personal data and stealing it at unprecedented rates. As a result, many of us have received notifications that our data has been compromised and may have fallen into the hands of criminals. That data may not have been stolen from your personal device, but from a third party, such as your healthcare provider, school, or online store.

Unfortunately, these breaches can be life-changing. For example, in March 2023, a hacker released sensitive personal information about 200,000 children attending his Minneapolis schools. They included personal details about campus rape incidents, child abuse investigations, student mental health crises, suspension reports, and more. Following another data breach that affected tens of thousands of residents in Oakland, California, one victim said the bad actors used their data to rack up fraudulent claims and buy new homes in their name. “We’re going through a financial nightmare,” he explained. These are not only tragic, but widespread. According to a Pew Research Center study on privacy and data breaches, personal data is increasingly falling into the wrong hands, with “a quarter (26%) of Americans reporting that they have had someone in the past 12 months said that fraudulent charges had been made to their debit or credit cards.

My organization’s research shows that basic cyber hygiene measures can prevent 99% of attacks, but only about half of users follow these practices. We all need to do better. But what if you could protect your data by scrambling it so that even if it was stolen, no one but you could read or use it? It’s a tool that helps protect your personal data from prying eyes by making it unreadable and unusable only by specific people and devices. It is designed so that no technology provider, third party, or intermediary can access your keys or unlock or read your data, whether in transit or at rest. To them, data looks like just digital gibberish.

This data protection superpower has made encryption emerge as perhaps the most powerful and effective tool for protecting personal privacy, safety, and security. please think about it. Every day, we trust browsers, services, and devices that use end-to-end encryption to protect our data from hackers, scammers, and criminals. We use your face, fingerprint, or passcode in your browser to protect your credit card number when you log into a website, when you purchase something online, and every time you use your face, fingerprint, or passcode to protect your data. We widely employ end-to-end encryption. In case your cell phone is lost or stolen. Encryption is also increasingly used to protect message content, so only the sender and intended recipient can read the message. But now, with 82% of data breaches related to the cloud, it’s time to take the next step of making end-to-end encryption options for cloud services more prevalent as well.

Good news. The past year has been a big win for consumers as more companies have started extending their use of end-to-end encryption to the cloud. They protect your phone’s personal data when it’s stored in iCloud, when you communicate using cloud-based messenger apps, or when you use cloud-based email services like Gmail. We have announced new procedures for This creates near-perfect data protection for hundreds of users. Millions of users.

However, end-to-end encryption in cloud services is still in its infancy. Most cloud data is stored in a way that is easily accessible to service providers and therefore hackers. For example, 39% of companies surveyed experienced a data breach in their cloud environment in 2022, but only about 45% of sensitive data stored in the cloud is encrypted. Studies show that this lack of encryption is the leading cause of sensitive data loss. “As long as organizations around the world continue to store treasure troves of valuable personal data in unencrypted form in the cloud, individuals will be at risk of having their personal data stolen, misused, or exposed,” said Dr. Stuart Madnick of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We continue to be exposed to the risks of

It is clear that more needs to be done to expand the use of encryption, and consumers agree. According to Trusted Future health research, 52% of consumers believe that their data is backed up and stored in an encrypted manner (using a “lock box”) and that only they have the key to unlock it. say they are more likely to trust technology if they are

Despite efforts to widen adoption, we have instead removed the “lock” from the “lockbox,” effectively outlawing the use of end-to-end encryption and threatening the personal safety of billions of people. Proposals to protect them are emerging all over the world. At risk. Specifically, policymakers in Australia, the UK, the EU, and the US are considering proposals that would stall, stifle, or even halt the adoption of the strong encryption needed to keep data safe. . Experts say that while these proposals aim at the well-intentioned goal of more comprehensively detecting child abuse and terrorist content, they do not require service providers to access user data encryption keys in order to scan and read personal data. , which fundamentally compromises data security for everyone.

The fundamental issues these policymakers are trying to address are important. Law enforcement must have the ability to prosecute crimes to the fullest extent of the law, and we must do more to protect children online. But there are better, smarter, and more effective ways to tackle these important issues without fundamentally compromising one of the most powerful and essential security technologies used to keep digital data safe. There is a method. In fact, many consumers say they want policymakers to reject efforts that would have the effect of weakening strong encryption.

It’s time to up your crypto game to advance a more reliable future. In the wake of the tsunami of data breaches that have exposed a record 2.6 billion personal records in the past two years alone, we encourage all organizations to adopt the strongest forms of encryption to protect individuals, even if hackers gain access. Data integrity must be protected. This is an important new privacy obligation.