If you want secure text-messaging, use an iPhone, suggests the Electronic Frontier Foundation

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last updated 8 January 2015

The EFF has a new "secure messaging scorecard," and while the digital privacy advocacy group explicitly says its scores "should not be read as endorsements of individual tools," there's a pretty clear winner among the popular name brands: Apple. The company's iMessage and FaceTime messaging apps aren't perfect, EFF says, but they're much more secure than Facebook Chat, SnapChat, WhatsApp, Google Chat/Hangouts, and AIM.

What sets Apple ahead of its mainstream competitors is that it encrypts its messages end-to-end, meaning that not even your carrier can read you iMessages. Apple also encrypts your old messages with a different key, so stored messages are secure even if someone discovers the current encryption key. Google and Facebook, on the other hand, only encrypt the messages while they're being sent, EFF says.

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.

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