Silent Circle will encrypt all your communications for a fee

Silent Circle, a new company set to get in business on July 2012, wants to offer secure communications for people willing to pay for protecting their privacy on-line. Co-founder of the company is Phil Zimmerman, the man who created the seminal Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) software in the Nineties.

PGP contributed (more than anything) to spread the use of cryptographic technology for putting people’s communications outside of the eavesdroppers reach, and now Zimmerman and his peers want to (re-)make history by turning privacy into something meaningful again.

The new company will secure (encrypt) communications in form of e-mails, phone calls, video calls (teleconference) and instant messaging, with software and apps available for every computer platform, mobile gadgets and devices on the market. One of the company founders described the encryption algorithms used as “very, very good”, with code coming from a seven years-long research work.

Managing the server infrastructure that will route encrypted traffic among the users will cost money, thus Silent Circle will ask for a fairly high fee of 20 dollars a month: speaking in that regard, Zimmerman says that his new company “is not Facebook”, the customers are just “customers” and not the product or “part of the inventory” as social networking makes them.

Will people – and young, smartphone-depending people in particular – care enough for their privacy to give Zimmermann & his peers a bit of their money for speaking and sharing with no fear of being monitored over the network? A recent poll about increasing concerns over on-line data collecting and archiving suggests so.

Source: Boing Boing.