[oxide]

I agree. I think it's reasonable to expect companies to safeguard that information from malicious actors.

[SoftTalker]

I don't agree. I don't think it's reasonable to expect it, because companies show over and over that they cannot do it. And let's face it, the only reason your company hasn't fallen victim to a data breach or ransomware is that you haven't been seriously targeted yet.

We need to change our approach. We need to look at why these kinds of data are valuable, and then make them not valuable. Then nobody will bother with hacking to get it.

[simfree]

This data is valuable primarily for spam mitigation and perhaps customer profiling.

Expect every SMS and MMS sent or received to be part of a spam mitigation and profiling program where it's stored indefinitely.

Apple not encrypting RCS is likely due to similar factors, where they have seen existing spam problems on RCS that are much harder to root out when you have end-to-end encryption.

[trinsic2]

Finally, some sense. My first though when reading the article was why are we even allowing these companies to collect that data in the first place.

[phito]

I don't think it is. I assume everyone gets hacked eventually. It's really hard (I would argue impossible) to make a 100% secure computer system, and if they're operated by people, you're terribly vulnerable.