Stop Trusting SMS Messaging and Stop Sending It- Warns Ontario Court Ruling
An Ontario-based Court of Appeals has given out an interesting new ruling, which might be of great interest for regular SMS senders and receivers. According to the startling details of this ruling, SMS messages are not private at all and as soon as these are sent, the sender loses control over it.
Related: Canadian jailed for refusing to unlock his phone at the airport
The reason is that just like email messages, SMS messages aren’t subject to the same level of protection that voice calls are and this is why we cannot regard SMS messages as private conversations and cannot even expect them to be protected like private conversations are.
[q]An Ontario Court of Appeals has ruled that your SMS messages are not private and once “sent to the ether” are no longer under your control.[/q]
The case in question involved Nour Marakah, the appellant, and his former co-accused, Andrew Winchester, exchanging texts regarding Marakah illegally purchasing firearms from Winchester.
This ruling would definitely be unsettling for SMS messages senders, which probably includes the entire world, but especially it is going to affect those who need to hide something. Many users would ignore this ruling considering that what happens in a Canadian court stays in a Canadian court and therefore, we shouldn’t feel affected. But, we do believe that the problem is quite widespread and it is not limited to a particular region.
So, the bottom line is that we need to choose another platform for sharing conversations instead of relying upon SMS messages. A cross-platform forum that offers end-to-end encryption would be a much better choice in this regard such as WhatsApp or Telegram.
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Related: FBI Given Powers by Supreme Court To Hack Any Device They Want, How They Want
[src src=”Source” url=”http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/your-texts-are-not-private-ontario-court-rules”]Vice[/src]
[src src=”Read Full Ruling” url=”http://www.ontariocourts.ca/decisions/2016/2016ONCA0542.pdf”]Ontario Courts (Pdf)[/src]
