08 Feb A good week for encryption technologies

Google’s recent announcement on their plans for Adiantum, a new encryption approach for securing data on phones will help to drive encryption into the mainstream as an important part of protecting personal information and data.  News too, that Facebook is looking at ways of ‘amalgamating’ data security across Facebook, Instagram and What’s App is focusing many minds on the thorny issues of usability and data privacy.  Users used to the simplicity of end-to-end encryption in an app like What’s App demand really slick and easy (non-intrusive) encryption.

An objective for Adiantum, Goggle explains, is to challenge the long-held view that encryption is slow and cumbersome, not very scalable and an adoption barrier in many situations.  This is good news for companies, such as Scentrics, that have already cracked this difficult problem and have much better answers to the lack of scalability in legacy data encryption and PKI systems. 

The Adiantum type of solution, is still a long way from putting more control into the hands of the users themselves.  They still assume that the trust between the large mega technology companies and their public is not broken.  As consumers, we may not be too bothered and still place our trust with companies in this way but as the scale of privacy abuse and trade-offs we have to make with our personal data become all too apparent there will likely be something of a backlash.