Due to concerns about surveillance, the French government is building its own encrypted messenger service. This move is meant to ease fears that foreign entities could spy on private conversations between top officials, the digital ministry said on Monday.
None of the world’s major encrypted messaging apps, including Facebook’s WhatsApp and are based in France, raising the risk of data breaches at servers outside the country.
“We need to find a way to have an encrypted messaging service that is not encrypted by the United States or Russia,” the spokeswoman said. “You start thinking about the potential breaches that could happen, as we saw with Facebook, so we should take the lead.”
The French government’s encrypted app has been developed on the basis of free-to-use code found on the Internet and could be eventually made available to all citizens, the spokeswoman said. So far, that is how much information they are willing to reveal.
