Meta Platforms announced on Monday that it has begun expanding its global testing of end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Messenger chats by default.
Meta’s Melissa Miranda said:
The social media giant said it plans to notify users in individual chat threads of their choice when security features are enabled, and the process of choosing and upgrading conversations to support E2EE will be random. I emphasized that there is
“It’s designed to be random so as not to negatively impact our infrastructure and people’s chat experiences,” Miranda further explained.
Beyond just flipping the E2EE switch, Meta has added even more features to the encrypted chat experience, including support for themes, custom emojis and reactions, group profile pictures, link previews, and active status.
The latest development comes just over five months after we officially started testing this feature as the default in August 2022. However, it’s worth noting that E2EE came into effect as an opt-in in the form of “secret conversations” about seven years ago. “
By comparison, WhatsApp already has E2EE enabled out of the box, and Instagram allows users to toggle E2EE on for individual conversations.
The security settings are also part of Meta’s broader “privacy-focused vision for social networking,” taking even more time to “do it right,” with plans to roll out to Messenger and Instagram at some point this year. hope to expand.
The move comes even further as the tech giant widely pushes to incorporate encryption options into its services. Google introduced his E2EE last month for group chats with up to 100 users in his RCS-based messaging app for Android. This feature is currently in beta only.
In a similar move, Apple announced an advanced data protection option for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS that enables end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) data backup with its iCloud service. An encrypted chat feature for Twitter Direct Messages is currently under development.
