Losing the Right to Encryption Means Losing Business

Every time a government passes a law that affects the Internet, tech companies must ask themselves a critical question: can they still properly provide their services while protecting user privacy under the new rules?

For companies operating in countries pursuing anti-privacy legislation, the answer is increasingly scary from both a user and corporate perspective.

That’s because anti-privacy laws often try to accomplish their goals by breaking or bypassing encryption – arguably the strongest and most widely available form of privacy and security in our digital age. Weakening encryption makes people and nations around the world more vulnerable to harm online.

But governments around the world that pass anti-privacy legislation are incurring unplanned costs that go beyond the chilling effects of lessened privacy for their citizenry.

Laws that attack encryption and privacy stifle their local tech industry and tarnish their reputation internationally, both of which are detrimental to their own economy.

To uphold the privacy and security of their users, some companies actually end up physically exiting a region and relocating servers – rather than weakening their service. This is something that the VPN company I work for, Private Internet Access, has done multiple times with the most recent example being Continue reading