Hillary Clinton's election loss was caused in part by her email habits. How could SafeSwiss' encryption have helped her avoid the scandal?

It happened: she failed. Hillary Clinton had the chance to be America's first female president, but instead the world has to watch four years of apocalyptic reality television.

Is it because the better man won? If his actions leading up to and immediately following the election are anything to go by, no. So what happened, and why is data privacy a factor?

What went wrong

There are a lot of reasons why Clinton lost the election, more than we can really get into here. Nationalism was a factor, as were economics, perceived trustworthiness and a constructed narrative of a plain-speaking everyman versus the Washington elite. Fear and anger played their part. But some of it was about more concrete issues, and one that kept coming up was Hillary's emails. 

Between 2009 and 2013, when Clinton was secretary of state, she used a personal email server instead of one provided by the government that was hosted on official, secure servers. She used this account for both personal and official emails.

The problem some critics have raised with this is that there was a potential security risk if Clinton had sent restricted government information via this personal server. The BBC noted that there was concern from both the right and the left that her "homebrew" email system would be susceptible to hackers and foreign intelligence services. 

In July this year the FBI investigated the email situation and concluded Clinton shouldn't face criminal charges. At the end of October, however, FBI Director James Comey announced that they had discovered more emails that may have been relevant to the case. He then said that he was right the first time and Clinton shouldn't face criminal charges - announcing this just days before the election. She claimed that none of the information she had sent by this email had been classified at the time, but it eventually came out that there had been classified and even 'top secret' information sent in her emails.

According to NBC News, Hillary reportedly said in a conference call to her donors that she thought Comey closing the enquiry so close to the election had pushed undecided voters towards Trump.

If only Hillary had SafeSwiss

It didn't have to be this way. If Hillary had had access to a secure, end-to-end encryption then her email habits wouldn't have been an election issue.

A product like SafeSwiss would have protected her in two ways: firstly, it would have made her potentially classified emails private and secure, removing the whole issue that people have with her personal server.

Secondly, it would have made it impossible for the FBI to later come along and discover all those emails she'd sent and received - with a true end-to-end encryption service like SafeSwiss, Clinton's emails would have been hidden from everyone except those she intended to send them to.

She needed it and you do too

We can't say that SafeSwiss would have saved the Clinton campaign, as much as we'd like to. The American public made its decision on a range of issues, of which the email scandal was just a small part. What we can say is that SafeSwiss would have given Clinton one less thing to worry about. Her emails and other digital communication would have been secured with military grade encryption, safe from the scrutiny of hackers, official bodies or the general public.

SafeSwiss offers you the same peace of mind. With our free app for your smart device or desktop, you can keep your voice, text and data transfers private and secure. SafeSwiss is available in the app store for Apple, Android and Windows Phone. Try it today to keep your communications, official or personal, between the people they're meant for.