Don’t Send Important Business Information Over SMS

SMS (Short Messaging Service) is a foundational messaging platform, empowering cellular communication for decades now. But the system is now, unfortunately, outdated, and should not be used for any important business communications—or any communication, if you can help it.

SMS’ main flaw is its lack of end-to-end encryption (E2EE): E2EE is the standard for high-quality messaging services in 2024. When you send a message in an E2EE-supported service, only your device and the recipient’s device can decrypt the message. To anyone else who tries to peak in, the contents of the message appear as a jumble of cryptographically-generated code.

Carriers do use encryption with SMS, but it’s typically a weak encryption that is easily broken. On top of that, SMS is sent in plain text: When you send an SMS to another phone, anyone with the know-how can intercept that message and read exactly what you sent, word for word. In addition, carriers can hold onto your texts, which means not only do they live on your phone, some may live with your carrier for some time.

For simple tasks, SMS is not dangerous to use. But when sending important business information, it’s far too insecure to trust. If you’re sending something private and confidential, make sure you’re using a communication mode that’s end-to-end encrypted. If you have an iPhone and you’re messaging another iPhone, that’s E2EE: The same goes for two Android phones texting each other through RCS. However, an iPhone and an Android cannot text with anything other than SMS (until Apple brings support for RCS later this year), so you will always be texting with SMS. Choose an E2EE alternative in this case.