Top cyber security experts have thrown their weight behind Apple and Google's privacy defence, saying users' encrypted communications data should stay private and turning it over to police would not help fight terrorism.

At the INTERPOL World Conference held in Singapore this week, Eugene Kaspersky, founder of global security firm Kaspersky Lab, rejected Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's suggestion that technology giants should better co-operate with police by sharing digital behaviour of some of their customers.

"I don't believe disclosing communications and making connections between different people would help fight terrorists," Mr Kaspersky told AFR Weekend. "Terrorists simply ignore open communications and it is impossible for forbid all cryptographic systems.

"The citizen has already lost so much privacy, they give so much of themselves. Besides, really smart law enforcement agencies use different data analysis to target malicious actors. Knowing what is inside individual messages is not that important, and criminals will always use different encrypted platforms to communicate. Products should be made secure, not with secret ways to break them."

Prime Minister Turnbull is currently in Hamburg, Germany, meeting with G20 world leaders and reportedly intends to pressure US-based technology giants to further share data regarding suspected criminal behaviour conducted on their platforms, via encrypted messaging apps.

During the week, Mr Turnbull said the rule of law, via a court order or warrant, should require technology companies to turn over their vast troves of personal data, if police suspect users of plotting to commit terrorist acts.

"We cannot allow these systems to be used as they are at the moment to enable terrorists and other criminals to basically conceal themselves to operate in the dark," Mr Turnbull told the ABC on Tuesday. "The law must be able to reach into those dark crevices and so that our agencies are able to keep us secure."

It is well established that terrorists mobilise and communicate with each other using encrypted services, such as WhatsApp, Wickr, Telegram Messenger, Signal, SilentCircle and ChatSecure.

These applications scramble the communication data as it transits from one device to another, shielding it from third party eyes.

But the likes of Google, Apple and Facebook have so far resisted calls to provide "backdoor" tools, enabling third parties to crack this encryption.

Instead, law enforcement agencies have stepped up their data collaboration, working with cyber security firms and a myriad of different police forces to form a more complete picture of global cyber crime.

Mr Kaspersky is the face of cyber security transparency, this week offering the company's source code for examination by US government officials to dispel long-held fears about the firm's ties to the Kremlin.

"But the United States have not taken me up on the offer," said Mr Kaspersky, a mathematical engineer who attended a KGB-sponsored school and once worked for Russia's Ministry of Defense.

"We have nothing to hide, we want people to understand how we do our business. But in fact, now one of the greatest losses for the global cyber crime and terrorist fight is that the United States have stopped sharing their intelligence with the rest of the world."

Data sharing among law enforcement agencies and governments is the most effective way of pre-empting acts of violent terror, he said. But revealing individual user's data is not useful. "We don't collect individual users data, we only can see the product ID," he said. "If we notice that malicious code is appearing, then we can zoom in and collect that user data, without actually knowing who that person is, but overall we do not collect it."

Cyber security firms themselves unify much of their cyber crime intelligence via the Cyber Threat Alliance. The Alliance was founded by Fortinet, Intel Security, Palo Alto Networks and Symantec.

Australia's recently appointed cyber security ambassador Dr Tobias Feakin attended the INTERPOL conference, on the back of signing a spate of cyber co-operation agreements with Singapore and Thailand in recent months.

The writer travelled to Singapore as a guest of Kaspersky Lab.