Media News - Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Twitter adds team who created privacy tools for activists

Twitter on Monday announced the acquisition of a two-person startup called Whisper Systems, whose technology protected people’s mobile-phone calls and text messages from being obtained by third parties such as governments. Whisper Systems created a suite of services for human-rights activists or other privacy-conscious individuals, which were used by activists during the recent “Arab spring” actions. One piece of software from Whisper Systems, called RedPhone, encrypts people’s voice communications, while another called TextSecure scrambles text messages. A third Whisper service let people download applications from the Android Market without sending private information to the application developers, who sometimes require it. The Whisper Systems acquisition caused concern among some privacy-minded individuals who don’t see how the startup’s services mesh with Twitter’s core function—helping people send public “tweets” or messages of up to 140 characters. Twitter also lets people broadcast tweets to a restricted group of individuals as well as send private “direct messages” to other Twitter users, and it has fought to inform users that the U.S. government was trying to obtain personal information about them. (Wall Street Journal blog)

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