Siim Teller is the Head of Marketing at Wire, a Switzerland – based secure communication solution that is open source, end to end encrypted and locates its servers in Germany and Ireland. His talk at the European Data Ethics Forum touched on end-to-end encryption, forms of surveillance and the need to address such risks by both individuals and organizations with encrypted messaging apps as Wire.
Siim started his talk by explaining what end to end encryption is. To do so, he compared Wire with Skype: while Skype has the keys to access the communication between its users hosted on Skype’s servers, Wire does not have access to this communication, despite hosting it on their servers.
After launching end-to-end encryption last year, Wire saw a demand from companies and NGOs. For this reason, Wire has dedicated the past 6 months to finding solutions for organizational communication.
Siim mentioned surveillance capitalism as being only one side of the problem. He further pointed at states, such as Russia, Turkey, China, that use the internet and messenger to track, profile and harass certain groups of citizens. Another threat Siim identified was that of hackers targeting business, recent cases including Equifax’s and Deloitte’s data breaches. Because, according to Wire’s Head of Marketing, email is an easy target for such threats, using an encrypted messaging solution can decrease the risk of data data breaches.
Watch Siim Teller’s full presentation here.
Watch the rest of European Data Ethics Forum talks here.
