After years of promises, end-to-end encryption comes to Messenger although not everyone approves
It seems that the day has arrived and although privacy and security play a vital role today, Meta had fallen behind in some key aspects, until now. The company behind popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp has taken a big and necessary step by implementing end-to-end encryption in Messenger.
This new feature, which is surely familiar to you from WhatsApp, ensures that your conversations and calls are protected, taking privacy to a higher level.
This change appears not to be sudden, as encrypted chats were introduced as an option in Messenger in 2016. However, now, end-to-end encryption will be the standard setting for conversations between two people.
Loredana Crisan, vice president of Messenger, explains that this transition has been a careful and meticulous process, with engineers, cryptographers, designers and other experts working to rebuild Messenger from the ground up.
Goal
More secure messages in Messenger now with end-to-end encryption
By activating end-to-end encryption, only you and the person you are writing to will be able to access the content of the message.
Yes indeed, clarify that it is between two people for the moment, since end-to-end encryption for group chats is still in development. Also, Instagram messages are not yet encrypted by default, although it seems that Meta has plans to implement this feature soon.
Taking these changes into account, Meta You will no longer have access to the content of what users send or receive, unless a user in a chat decides to report a message to the company. The new features will be available immediately, but the company has commented that it will take some time for Messenger chats to be updated with the default end-to-end encryption.
Currently being more than 1,000 million users of the platform, Users will be prompted to set up a recovery method to restore their messages once the transition is complete.
“I believe that the future of communication will increasingly move towards private, encrypted services where people can be sure that what they say to each other will remain secure and their messages and content will not remain forever,” commented Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. “This is the future I hope we help achieve,” he adds.
The question now is whether this is really positive or not, since some have raised the alarm because it could be really beneficial for criminals. Of course, no one is ever happy.
