“People are worried about things that are encrypted today staying secure several decades in the future,” La Cour says. Even if companies upgrade their encryption technology as new algorithms come along and go back and re-encrypt all the old files that they’ve stored, it’s impossible to know where all your old messages have gone.
“If emails go out and are intercepted, there’s now this warehouse of messages somewhere where someone is waiting for a quantum computer to come along and break them all,” he says. “People are really concerned about that.”