• by Ben Frederick , Staff Writer @mp_benfred, May 5, 2016

Having a private conversation in the digital world can be tough, but over-the-top (OTT) messaging companies like Whatsapp and Viber are making it happen, much to the chagrin of the world’s governing bodies.

Over all of the arguments on both sides though, there hangs a Damoclean sword. Those who advocate for encryption are faced with the potential for their technology to facilitate some terrorist act (a slippery slope, appeal-to-emotion argument with tenuous claims to reality, but it’s an argument being made nonetheless), while those who speak against encryption are blind if they don’t think data privacy won’t be a huge issue down the road.

This industrywide adherence to privacy (perhaps in some cases, to the protection of proprietary data) has brought companies into conflict with governments on more than one occasion—most recently when a Brazilian judge tried to shut down Whatsapp for 72 hours for refusing to comply with a data request in a criminal case.

From those in the tech world, companies like Whatsapp, Apple, and Viber have received nothing but accolades for supporting encryption. Those that side with law enforcement agencies foresee a future where all data is encrypted and small terrorist cells can communicate and wreak havoc with impunity.

How (and where and when and why) data encryption will be used are questions that are still being asked in the industry. But it seems to me that the market will have a much larger say in the matter. When it comes to a choice between some level of data protection or none at all, either on an individual or enterprise level, I can’t think of anyone who’d choose to go bare.