The French government has started building its own encrypted messenger app to prevent foreign entities from spying on their nation. None of the worlds major messaging apps are based in France raising the risk of data breaches outside the country.
The top 20 officials of the country are testing the application designed by the developer they hired, said by a ministry spokeswoman.
“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 Facebook-owned WhatsApp is under heavy criticism since their parent company has acknowledged that information about unauthorized usage 87 Million users data. The French governments encrypted app has been developed using the open source code on the internet and eventually will be made available to all the citizens of France.
The government advisers and ministers have grown fond of the Telegram app, which they used to plan the presidential election campaign last year. The Minister of Economy wanted to use the application which has an encrypted service not easily crackable by their own government and President Emmanuel Macron often uses Telegram himself.
The Telegram app was set up by a Russian entrepreneur who has gotten into conflict with the Russian government. The Russian State Telecommunications Regulator said on Monday it had begun blocking access to Telegram after the organization refused to comply with an order to give state security access to its users secret messages.
The WhatsApp and Telegram apps both support advanced encryption standard. which has good security. While WhatsApp relies on industry’s encryption standards, Telegram uses a homegrown encryption method.
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