Years after Mark Zuckerberg said encrypted chats were coming to Messenger, they're finally enabled by default.
Meta brings end-to-end encryption to Messenger chats and calls, finally delivering on a promise that's been in the works for quite some time for a long time. When end-to-end encryption is turned on, only the person you send messages to in Messenger can see its contents, the company says.
The Verge writes about this.
Encrypted chats were first introduced as an option in Messenger in 2016, but after continued development, end-to-end encryption of messages and calls for conversations between two people will become standard in the future.
“This took years because we took our time to get it right,” said Loredana Crisan, vice president of Messenger, in a statement provided to The Verge. “Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger functionality from the ground up.”
According to Crisan, you won't be sacrificing Messenger features when using encrypted chats, so you'll still be able to use things like themes and custom reactions. However, Crisan notes that it may take some time for all Messenger chats to switch to encryption by default.
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While this is a good step, end-to-end encryption for Messenger group chats remains optional for now. Messages on Instagram are also not encrypted by default, although Meta said in August that this would soon be the case when Messenger private chats launched by default.”
CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019 that the company plans to move to encrypted ephemeral messages in its messaging apps.
“I believe that the future of communication will increasingly shift towards private, encrypted services where people can trust that what they say to each other remains secure and that their messages and content are not will remain forever,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “This is the future that I hope we can help bring closer.”
Enabling encryption by default means that Meta will not only be unable to see the contents of most Messenger chats, but will also be unable to share them with law enforcement.
The company made headlines last year when a 17-year-old Nebraska girl and her mother were criminally charged with performing an illegal abortion after police obtained Messenger chat history.
Anti-encryption proponents say the technology makes it harder to find attackers in messaging programs like WhatsApp, which are already encrypted by default.
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