On Wednesday, Meta officially introduced the end-to-end encryption for individual chats and calls on Messenger. Finally, this commitment has been fulfilled and has been under process for a long while. According to the Meta, With end-to-end encryption, the content of the message is only visible to you and the recipient.
End-to-end encryption is a method in which your texts, photos, videos, and phone calls are private, and Third parties, even Meta itself cannot get access to your content. The technology works so that only the sender and receiver can understand the intended chats.
The purpose of this feature is to make more apps like Whatsapp and iMessage. This means no one, even Meta, cannot see your conversations on messaging apps unless you report your message to them. Law enforcement authorities say that this encryption makes it harder for them to track criminals.
Back in 2016, this encrypted chat feature was initially offered as an optional feature in Messenger. But it is further updated, and it becomes a default setting for messages and calls between two individuals.
Loredana Crisan, VP of Messenger, emphasized in his statement that the prolonged duration of the delivery process was because of a deliberate and meticulous approach to ensure accuracy. She further highlighted the dedicated effort of the engineers, cryptographics, designers, policy experts, and product management teams. They work diligently and tirelessly to build the encrypted feature of Messenger from scratch.
Crisan further ensures that while using encrypted features, you will not lose other features and allow you to continue enjoying features like theme and custom reactions. However, she acknowledged that it may take some time for all messenger chats to switch over to default encryption.
Although it is a good move toward end-to-end encryption for individual messenger chats. It is important to note that this encrypted security feature for group Messenger chats remains an opt-in choice at present.
Moreover, default encryption is not implemented on Instagram messages. However, Meta already announced in August that encryption for Instagram messages will also be introduced very soon right after the completion of the default private Messenger chat.
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta will be shifted toward encrypted messages across all its messaging platforms. Zuckerberg further expressed his beliefs in developing the communication landscape and he envisioned that the future would be dominated by private secure messaging services.
The purpose of enabling encryption by default is that Meta will be unable to see the conversation on Messenger preventing the company from complying with law enforcement requests. However, the downside of this feature is that it makes it harder to navigate the bad people on such encrypted messaging apps.
Along with encrypted messages, Meta also plans to introduce some other features that are already present on WhatsApp, like a notification in which you will receive a notification when someone opens and reads your messages. And the disappearance of the messages after 24 hours and editing of already sent messages.