Imagine if every email, bank transaction, text, or social media post you ever made was searchable online in plain, unencrypted text. That would mean an unprecedented window into our lives with consequences that are hard to imagine.

Experts say that vision is not a dystopian nightmare, but a fast-approaching reality thanks to recent advances in quantum computing. Computers that use quantum phenomena like superposition and entanglement to perform calculations have long been touted as both a distant promise and a bogeyman. The truth is more nuanced, but no less frightening for those who value their privacy.

“The nature of quantum computing allows us to solve certain problems in practical time that would take a classical computer much longer,” Chuck Easttom, an assistant professor at Georgetown University who studies cryptography and quantum computing, said in an email interview.

"And it just so happens that the mathematical problems that quantum computers are good at are also the mathematical problems that underlie the security of RSA, Diffie-Hellman, Elliptic Curve, and related algorithms."