Meta has reaffirmed plans to roll out support for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default for one-to-one friends and family chats on Messenger by the end of the year.
The company said it is upgrading “millions more people’s chats” effective August 22, 2023, as part of its efforts to make E2EE the default for all Messenger chats.
E2EE encrypts messages so that only the sender and recipient can read them, even Meta cannot. This means that messages sent on Messenger will be more secure and private.
“Like many messaging services, Messenger and Instagram DMs were originally designed to function via servers,” Timothy Buck, product manager for Messenger, said. “Meta’s servers act as the gateway between the message sender and receiver, what we call the clients.”
The move to E2EE is part of Meta’s broader privacy-focused vision for its products. In 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be making privacy a top priority, and that it would be working to make its products more secure and private.
Meta further noted that it rebuilt over 100 features in Messenger, including sharing links to external sites like YouTube, without breaking encryption safeguards.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheHackerNews.