Privacy battle rages on as FBI locks horns with Google and Apple

FBI clashes with Google and Apple over security encryption.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is rather disappointed with tech giants Google and Apple over their new data encryption initiatives. The battle between the FBI and the companies has been raging on for a while now and things only seem to be getting worse. This has been a heavily debated topic over whether devices should have data encryption that would make it difficult for law enforcement agencies to access.

In an interview with The Washington Post last week, the FBI director had publicly criticized Apple and Google for producing smartphones with complex data encryption, the key to which even they don’t have. Apple and Google had come under fire last year when the world found out that the NSA had access to users’ private information.

Comey’s biggest concern was that if Google and Apple could not decrypt the data themselves, it would lead to criminals misusing this feature to break the law and get away with it.

With the two companies selling their phones internationally, this move was seen as a way to woo international customers, who were wary of their information being accessed by the government.

This is being dubbed as the Crypto War 2.0. The first crypto war was in the early 90s when desktops were becoming popular. At the time, security agencies had asked for access to “digital keys” to monitor what people accessed on the internet.

However, smartphones are more personal than desktop computers and contain more information about a person and their daily life.

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