Facebook: Encryption Ensures Undersea Data Security

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Facebook and Google are building a fiber-optic undersea cable market to carry data across the world. In this report, Facebook says encryption will protect data, though experts raise questions. 

Facebook and Google now are the biggest players in the undersea fiber-optic cable market, investing heavily in multiple subsea networks and raising concerns about private ownership of vital global infrastructure — as well as the potential threats to data privacy.

The internet giants’ emergence in the subsea cable sector comes amid insatiable global demand for content, bandwidth and storage — and as underwater networks increasingly are recognized as essential for the world’s governments and economics, not to mention millions of everyday people.

Silicon Valley’s involvement in cables also comes as the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack earlier this month highlights the risks of privately owned infrastructure.

“Our approach is to build state-of-the-art, secure subsea cables — where all data moving through them would be encrypted to the highest industry standards,” Monica Wik, a Facebook spokesperson, told Digital Privacy News.

“On subsea cables that we are developing, like Echo and Bifrost, Facebook’s traffic is physically separated from other parties,” she said. “We use advanced encryption to ensure our data remains secure.”

Google did not respond to emailed questions about its undersea cables.

Linking Data Centers

Echo and Bifrost are two of the 13 undersea cables Facebook owns outright or has a financial stake in, according to TeleGeography, an industry research group.

These new cables — Echo is a collaboration with Google — will connect data-hub Singapore and population-dense Indonesia to California by way of Guam.

Wik said the application for Echo was filed with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at the end of March and other applications were in various stages of approval, including for Bifrost.

Echo, she said, was expected to be completed in late 2023 and Bifrost in late 2024.

Facebook said the cables would increase overall transpacific capacity by 70%.

Tom Uren, a senior analyst at the Cyber Policy Centre of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, noted to Digital Privacy News: “Spending on cable infrastructure isn’t a decision made in isolation — but is a balancing act on all the other infrastructure required to run a service, especially data centers, with a whole series of different trade-offs involved.

“Data centers for the internet giants can cost billions, whereas cables cost hundreds of millions.

“In the case of an underdeveloped market, it makes sense to pay for cables that would allow you to grow the market when the demand to justify a data center doesn’t yet exist.

“Put another way,” Uren added, “the investors are certainly choosing the cheapest way to get what they want for the future of their business.”

What Are the Risks?

Kyung-Sin Park, director of the American Law Center at Korea University and head of Open Net Korea, said the new, more powerful undersea cable networks would help American companies keep all the personal data of their users in the United States.

“Instead of putting cache servers in local countries, they can service content by storing it in U.S. and distributing directly from the U.S.,” he said.

“The undersea cable network has always had a set of big players,” she told Digital Privacy News. “And before it was Google and Facebook, it was the nationally affiliated telecom companies, carriers such as AT&T.

“So, even if there are new forms of equity in terms of data control, this is not an entirely new form of organization in the industry.”

Starosielski said the cables themselves were not the most vulnerable part of the undersea network. 

“It is technically possible to tap into submarine cables, but there are a lot of factors that make that a very slim likelihood,” she said. “It is infinitely easier to tap into other points of the network.

“It would be like doing a ‘Mission Impossible’-style entrance through the ductwork of a building when the front door is wide open.

“The undersea cable network has always had a set of big players,” she told Digital Privacy News. “And before it was Google and Facebook, it was the nationally affiliated telecom companies, carriers such as AT&T.

“So, even if there are new forms of equity in terms of data control, this is not an entirely new form of organization in the industry.”

Starosielski said the cables themselves were not the most vulnerable part of the undersea network. 

“It is technically possible to tap into submarine cables, but there are a lot of factors that make that a very slim likelihood,” she said. “It is infinitely easier to tap into other points of the network.

“It would be like doing a ‘Mission Impossible’-style entrance through the ductwork of a building when the front door is wide open.

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