The Center for Democracy & Technology, Global Partners Digital, the Internet Freedom Foundation, the Internet Society, and Mozilla, constituting the Steering Committee of the Global Encryption Coalition (GEC), issued the following:
On 18 May, Discord announced that all voice and video calls on its platform would now be end-to-end encrypted by default. Over 150 million Discord users will benefit from the increased security and privacy that end-to-end encryption provides. Earlier this month, Apple and Google announced the rollout of end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging. When fully implemented, messages between Android and iPhone users will be end-to-end encrypted by default.
An estimated 4 billion people worldwide use iPhones and Android devices and stand to benefit from safer communications through end-to-end encrypted messaging.
End-to-end encryption keeps people’s communications safe, and it enables freedom of expression, freedom of association, and other human rights. It helps protect personal communications from criminals, malicious actors, and unauthorized access. For members of at-risk communities, ubiquitous end-to-end encryption is essential for ensuring their physical safety.
As more services adopt end-to-end encryption by default, the need to protect against threats to encryption becomes even more important. When governments seek to undermine the use of end-to-end encryption, they threaten the safety and privacy of billions of people around the world.
The widespread and growing embrace of end-to-end encryption is something worth celebrating. We must ensure that efforts to weaken encryption do not reverse this important progress.