Ever since the Windows 9x days, there have been backdoors implemented by the government for the sake of security, monitoring every device running those OSes as well as to detect everything for any illegal activity. The computer's public IP address is one example on how the bad guy can be tracked down based on the situation encountered by the respective companies running those services the bad guy uses. The serious downside is that it weakens the purpose of proper cyber-security as this kind of cyber-surveillance/monitoring is considered illegal cyber-spying and the situations regarding that have been on-going. Back to two years ago, there had been cyber-security concerns many tech giants had and that they decided to increase the security level through encryption for their services, apps, devices and even the OSes. But by implementing that, it can allow the cyber-criminals to do whatever they want undetected and that's not what the government agencies want. There has to be some kind of equality like having higher security level that protects customers from all kinds of illegal cyber-activities organized by cyber-criminals and even the illegal cyber-spying done through government backdoors while still making sure that the devices can still be tracked down should their owners get their devices stolen or perhaps lost that they need help or something for instance. Another downside is that having improved security can make things more difficult for those agencies even with the warrant issued.
Perhaps, each side has its own upside and downside but it might seem that Android 5.1 may be making sure that the strong encryption for the phone is not made technically compulsory by default that the customers can turn it on if they want to. There was a recent news regarding the same encryption level for latest Iphones that was trolled, like it mentioned that the latest Iphones are the baddies' device of choice. It may be due to the fact that the strong encryption level such as End-to-End and Full Device encryptions that are enabled by default like there's no way to disable them.
I guess that there should be security balance and better importance of privacy and security or there will be concerns about the loss of customer trusts that may affect the technology business without proper security. And of course, if the services have like serious security issues as if the companies use them to do illegal data collection for advertisement for instance, why do we want to use them in the first place? Does it sound like they're betraying us with that? It has been the same story we know and blog about like there's no signs of new updates coming in.
