It’s taken a while, but end-to-end encrypted conversations are finally becoming a reality for Facebook and Messenger users.
Meta Messenger director Loredana Crisan announced in a blog post that the company has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for personal chats and calls.
good news? Meta is turning on privacy-preserving encryption, built by default on the highly regarded Signal protocol and its own Labyrinth protocol.
This means that only you, the sender, and the intended recipient can access the contents of the message. Others, including law enforcement or Facebook parent company Meta itself, can’t see what you send, and they can’t fake the message to make it look like it was sent from someone else’s account.
Of course, Facebook has a long history of making questionable decisions when it comes to user safety—often enabling features that undermine user privacy without their informed consent and requiring those who realize they’re at risk to deactivate them. . feature.
This time around, however, they appear to have done the right thing – bringing Messenger closer to the full end-to-end conversation encryption offered by its stablemate WhatsApp and rival Signal.
“We work closely with external experts, academics, advocates and governments to identify risks and develop mitigations to ensure privacy and security go hand in hand,” Crisian said.
For now, group chat encryption remains an opt-in feature. One hopes that this will change over time.
For now, though, everyone should be happy that Meta is launching end-to-end encryption – right?
Well, don’t assume too quickly. For example, the UK government has been publicly pressuring social media and secure messaging companies not to deploy secure end-to-end encryption – arguing that it would make it difficult to investigate the sharing of child sexual abuse content and allow pedophilia The groom is the victim.
Signal and WhatsApp have said they will refuse to comply with demands to weaken encryption, saying the technology protects journalists, human rights lawyers, marginalized groups from rogue regimes and protects everyone’s privacy.
“When E2EE is set to default, we will also use a variety of tools, including artificial intelligence, to proactively detect accounts engaging in malicious behavior patterns rather than scanning private messages, subject to applicable laws,” Meta said.
The company has previously described some of the steps it takes to identify suspicious adults on its network.
The message is clear. You should buckle up because a fierce battle is coming between tech companies rolling out end-to-end encryption for messaging services and governments angry that there is no longer a way to snoop on private messages.
