The technology industry is enraged about the surveillance from the NSA that was recently revealed.
The New York Times has recently reported that the giants of the tech environment, such as Google, are now spending millions to enhance their online and mobile security internal data encryption in order to help to keep the National Security Agency (NSA) from being able to hack “their systems without their knowledge or cooperation”.
This is only one of many reports since June, regarding the spying that the NSA has been doing.
The American government has been using a loophole that it has found to be able to sidestep whatever agreements in online and mobile security that it may have established with these industry leading companies. While this has caused a massive amount of outrage, at the same time, this discovery has managed to point out to companies such as Google that they have been facing considerable vulnerabilities.
This internet and mobile security issue has underscored a greater issue regarding private information collection.
The leaders in the tech world, from Google to Yahoo! and from Facebook to Twitter, are now all applying new online and mobile security efforts in order to create an even more solid barrier to help to protect themselves from not only hackers, but also the government, so that they will be able to use that same data that they are protecting, to sell ads that are personalized to their users.
For example, according to the New York Times, Google has been changing its security keys – that is, the codes that are used for unlocking data that has been digitally encrypted, in order to make it readable – every few weeks, Facebook, Google, and Yahoo! have now all said that they are boosting their key length in order to make it more difficult to be able to crack them.
Furthermore, Facebook is going to an additional effort of increasing its online and mobile security encryption with the so-called perfect forward secrecy. That is a step that was already taken by Google two years ago. This means that even if someone does manage to get their hands on a secret key, that individual still will not be able to decrypt past traffic and messages.
