On Thursday, November 7, Meta announced that the company has begun the process of rolling out end-to-end encryption across the Messenger and Facebook applications.
Messenger Vice President, Loredana Crisan, said that the encryption is based on the Signal protocol and Meta's Labyrinth protocol.
Krisann added that the new features that were announced took years to develop because the company's engineers, designers, cryptographers and others rebuilt the app from the ground up.
“We worked closely with external experts, academics, advocates and governments to identify risks and build mitigations to ensure that privacy and safety go hand in hand,” she explained.
Meta made the “Secret Conversations” service available on Messenger for the first time, in 2016. Then the company reported that it had tested the end-to-end encryption feature, or as it is known as end-to-end encryption, for the first time. By Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2019. The company had previously intended to roll out the feature by default in 2022, but delayed the launch amid concerns that this would prevent Meta from detecting child abuse on its platform.
Under the changes, Meta will not be able to access the content of what users send or receive, unless one user in the chat chooses to report a message to the company.
The new features will be available immediately, but the company said that updating Messenger conversations with the default end-to-end encryption will take some time.
It will take months for end-to-end encryption to be rolled out to more than a billion users on the platform. Users will receive a prompt to set up a recovery method to restore their messages once the transfer is complete.
The move is likely to raise concern among law enforcement and child protection groups, which have opposed companies implementing end-to-end encryption.
End-to-end encryption will not be implemented on Instagram at this time, but the company said in August that the change will apply to the popular photo app shortly after the Messenger upgrade is complete.
It is worth noting that WhatsApp conversations are already encrypted.
Other new features being rolled out include the ability to edit a message up to 15 minutes after sending it, disappearing messages for 24 hours, controlling whether a user can see you've read their message, and the ability to listen to voice messages at 1.5 or 2 times speed.
It raises concerns for law enforcement and child protection groups.
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