The shutdown announcement follows reports that the company’s free messaging app had allowed criminals to exchange images of child sexual abuse. “After careful consideration, we will be concentrating Wickr’s focus on securing our business and public sector customers’ data and communications with AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, and have decided to discontinue our consumer product, Wickr Me,” Amazon said, adding that the company was working on allowing Wickr customers to securely communicate with individuals outside of their organization. Wickr’s other products, which are geared toward government agencies, military organizations and enterprises, won’t be impacted. The shutdown will only affect the consumer-facing version of Wickr, which has become popular among journalists and whistleblowers looking to send end-to-end encrypted and self-destructing messages. Amazon says the app will stop accepting new user registrations on Decembefore it’s discontinued completely the following year. In a post published Friday, Amazon said that Wickr Me will shut down for good on December 31, 2023. Wickr was founded in 2011 and became one of the first mainstream end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, until it was acquired by Amazon’s cloud services giant Amazon Web Services in 2021. WhatsApp is another decent choice, particularly now that it has improved its desktop and mobile apps by including several essential new functions.Secure communications provider Wickr has announced that it will shutter its free encrypted messaging app, Wickr Me, next year. Telegram, Signal, and Viber are three more accessible alternatives to Wickr Me that also provide encrypted messaging. In June, NBC News claimed that the app had become a "go-to destination" for such material.Įven underground market drug traffickers have found a use for the messaging app. However, Wickr Me has been called out for allegedly not taking sufficient steps to prevent sharing sexually explicit photographs of children. Q-Tel, the financial arm of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), invested $1.6 million in the company before Amazon purchased it last year, and it reportedly had a $900,000 deal with U.S. Journalists and whistleblowers also find it useful. PC Mag reported that all branches of the Department of Defense use Wickr because of its high-strength encryption, which the firm says would take trillions of years to crack. Secure end-to-end encrypted messaging - including text, images, videos, and file attachments - across Android, iOS, Mac OS X, and Windows platforms was one of the main reasons AWS acquired the company last year. See Also: Signal Messaging App to Add Stories: How to Share Stories on the App An Almost Perfect Messaging App Wickr also declared it would give further information to existing Wickr Me users in the coming months on steps they may take to safeguard their data. In the article announcing the suspension, PC Mag reported that the firm is now working on a feature that would make it possible for AWS Wickr clients in the commercial and public sectors to connect with individual users who were not part of its network. The shutdown affects only the consumer-facing version of Wickr, used by journalists, whistleblowers, and anybody who wants to keep their conversations private. We're focusing on enabling this in AWS Wickr too." Next Project for WickrĪccording to The Verge, Amazon Web Services (AWS) purchased Wickr in June 2021 and began putting the commercial version of the encrypted messaging software into its products for enterprises.īoth versions of the AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise apps will remain available indefinitely. "We also realize that some of our business and public sector customers use Wickr to communicate with individual users outside their network.
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