Amazon It’s been closing lately. After confirming the closure of Amazon Drive, a cloud storage service, now it is the turn of Wickr, a subsidiary that has announced the closing your encrypted messaging app, Wickr Mefor next year.
Wickr was founded in 2011 and has positioned itself as one of the most popular options within its segment, that of messaging services that offer end-to-end encryption. It was acquired by Amazon Web Services in 2021, since then being a subsidiary of the cloud giant belonging to the corporation founded by Jeff Bezos.
Wickr’s free messaging app will be phased out as from December 31, 2022 it will stop accepting new user registrations to be definitively closed one year later, on December 31, 2023. In this way, users are given a lot of room to migrate to other solutions with the same or similar characteristics.
It’s important to note that the shutdown will only affect consumer-oriented products, which were quite popular with journalists and whistleblowers because end-to-end encryption makes it difficult for cyberspies and malicious actors to intercept messages. For his part, products geared toward government agencies, military organizations, and businesses will not be affected by this shutdown.
In the publication announcing the upcoming closure of Wickr for consumers, Amazon explained that, “after careful consideration, we will concentrate Wickr’s focus on protecting the data and communications of our commercial and public sector customers with AWS Wickr and Wickr Enterprise, and we have decided to discontinue our consumer product, Wickr Me.”
This movement may have its origin in the fact that free messaging app had allowed criminals to exchange images of child sexual abuse. This was denounced in June by NBC News citing official documents, law enforcement and activists, who accused the company of doing little to proactively address the problem. Another thing to keep in mind is that Wickr Me had become a hub for drug dealers who found themselves driven off the dark web by the closure of sites like Silk Road.
Seeing as the consumer-oriented service has been used for some pretty shady business and Wickr has the CIA and controversial private security firm Blackwater among its backers, it seems this shutdown is more an attempt by Amazon to clean up its image than another thing, and to know what pressures both the parent company and the subsidiary have received for this matter. Looking at the apparent reasons for Wickr Me’s closure, it would not be surprising to find out that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
