Category: Transparency Report

The human rights to private communication and free speech are at the core of our mission at Wickr. These values drive every technical and policy decision we make as a company. That is the reason why Wickr’s communication platform was designed using our patented technology to function as a zero-knowledge system.

Our encryption technology is created to be accessible and available to anyone in the world because we believe that everyone’s conversations and transactions deserve the best security possible — be they human rights activists, aid workers, law enforcement, children, journalists, or financial and educational institutions. Our users trust us to secure their communication and protect their right to privacy and we take this responsibility seriously.

To defend free speech and privacy at the international level, we were recently joined by the Human Rights Foundation to submit an advocacy paper on the use of encryption and anonymity in digital communication to the UN Special Rapporteur on the protection and promotion of the right to freedom of opinion and expression.

Today, alongside major civil liberties organizations, Wickr welcomes the UN Human Rights Council resolution appointing a Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. We see it as a critical step taken by the international community to ensure that the right to privacy is protected across the globe by states and private corporations.

With a record number of major security breaches reported last year, Wickr believes it is critical for all — governments, technology industry and users around the world — to demand bold and innovative thinking around developing privacy and security safeguards across global systems. We strongly advocate exploring new business models that strengthen users’ privacy and security instead of exploiting their trust. Wickr’s team of world-class encryption experts is proud to have built a platform to protect any complex communication flows from being compromised and exposed. We believe in a privacy by design approach, using encryption as a default means to protect our basic human rights to privacy and free expression.

We believe in cryptography for the masses by default. We believe in zero-knowledge systems. We believe that all data or communications should have an expiration date, and we are committed to providing these free tools to our users.

This year we received a near all-star rating from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for our demonstrated commitment to protecting users’ data from government requests. We stood alongside industry leaders and collected stars for requiring a warrant for content, telling our users about government data requests, publishing transparency reports and law enforcement guidelines, and fighting for our users’ rights in Congress. Had we fought for our users’ rights in court, we would have received a perfect score, but we have not yet had standing to do so.

At the beginning of this year, Wickr’s CEO Nico Sell spoke publicly about saying no to an FBI backdoor which is why we are happy to see other companies fighting back against the government’s overreaching behavior. Our belief is that while all governments must protect their citizens, we as citizens and as companies, must stand up for one of the pillars of freedom – privacy.

Towards that end, we placed the first warrant canary into a transparency report last summer, after the revelations by Edward Snowden, and are constantly looking for ways to innovate and protect our users, with other companies like Apple and Lookout following suit.

To further innovate, we have added a red canary to our website under the Ownership and Transparency section. If the canary flies the coop, the tone of this report will change as well because things will have shifted. But we are optimistic that our canary will remain, given the unique nature of our technology and the fact that we are a zero-knowledge system.

“In light of recent events involving data-collection practices within the U.S., it is apparent that certain government organizations are eager to gain access to user information for various reasons pursuant to the PRISM Program. We at Wickr are cognizant of such practices but maintain that due to the specific architecture employed by Wickr there are no back-doors to our system.”

“Wickr was founded on the belief that your data belongs to you and is designed to protect that right. Furthermore, because of the manner in which messages on Wickr are encrypted, even with a properly issued subpoena, Wickr can only provide a snapshot of the account at a given moment which could include information regarding the date of creation of an account, the type of device on which the account is used, and the date of last use of the account.”