Facebook on Monday became the third major tech company to side with Apple in its battle with the federal government.
“We’re sympathetic with Apple. We believe in encryption; we think that that’s an important tool,” CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at a conference in Barcelona, according to several reports. “I don’t think requiring backdoors with encryption is either going to be an effective way to increase security or is really the right thing to do for just the direction that the world is going.”
Last week, a federal judge ordered Apple to assist the Federal Bureau of Investigation in accessing the contents of an iPhone 5C used by a perpetrator in the December terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif. The software that Apple was ordered to create would disable a “self-destruct” function on the phone that activates after an incorrect password has been entered more than 10 times.
Apple has said that amounts to creating a “backdoor” circumventing encryption on all of its products. The Justice Department has suggested it amounts to a one-time method of bypassing a single password.
1/5 Important post by @tim_cook. Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 17, 2016
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have also expressed support for Apple’s position. “Forcing companies to enable hacking could compromise users’ privacy,” Pichai said in a Feb. 17 message on Twitter.
Zuckerberg said his company, which owns popular encrypted messaging application “WhatsApp,” does work with the federal government when possible.
“We certainly do have very strong policies on this. If there is any content that is promoting terrorism or sympathizing with [the Islamic State], we’ll take that off the service,” Zuckerberg said.
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“We don’t want people doing that kind of stuff on Facebook. If we have opportunities to basically work with governments and folks to make sure that there aren’t terrorist attacks, then we’re going to take those opportunities and we feel a pretty strong responsibility to help make sure that society is safe. We care about that. That’s a big deal. We take that seriously,” he added.
