End-to-end encryption is essential for online privacy. Without it, service providers are able to eavesdrop on your communications, see your pictures and piece together your whole life. That might be okay if you could trust them to keep your information private, but they won't. They use it to categorize you, track you, and sell you to advertisers, or give you over to Big Brother.

However, as the article points out, some people are abusing that privacy. When their content is encrypted, there is no way to distinguish it from all the other encrypted content flowing through the system. If something is not done about it, we could lose this important privacy-enhancing tool in the name of going after these bad actors. What we need is a way to separate the harmful content from the rest without actually looking at any of it! I call this "the content problem." On its face, this seems like an impossible task. However, through a combination of cryptography and artificial intelligence, there may be a way.