Meta Begins Testing End-to-End Encryption For Individual Messenger Chats

Social media giant Meta announced on Thursday that it is adding individual Messenger chats to its end-to-end encryption test.

Meta announced that beginning this week, participants in the test will automatically have end-to-end encryption applied to their most frequent discussions.

The tech giant made its revelation a few days after it turned up a teen's private Facebook messages to police in a Nebraska case where she was accused of having an abortion.

Notably, Meta would not have been able to reveal this information if the messages had been end-to-end encrypted.

End-to-end encryption tools for Messenger were originally tested by Meta in 2016 for "private talks."

In 2021, it expanded that protection to cover voice and video calls.

The company made end-to-end encryption the standard setting for Messenger group chats and calls in January.

Contrary to WhatsApp, Meta's other well-liked chat application, end-to-end encryption is not yet set as the default setting for all talks.

In addition, the business is testing the "secure storage" feature for iOS and Android's end-to-end encrypted talks.

By encrypting them with a PIN or code, users will be able to upload their Messenger backup on independent cloud services like iCloud or Google Drive.

Only end-to-end chats, such as group conversations, are now protected by Secure Storage on iOS and Android; non-encrypted chat and Messenger for the web and desktop are not included.

After receiving years of criticism, WhatsApp last year began providing encrypted backup to its 2 billion+ members.

Even though the chat software always provided end-to-end encryption protection for chats, its backups were not safeguarded, potentially allowing law enforcement access to all the data.

The end-to-end encryption test for Instagram DMs will soon be expanded, according to Meta. Instagram began experimenting with end-to-end encrypted communications through an opt-in feature last year.

The tool was first made available to all customers in Ukraine and Russia in February, according to the business.

The social media giant will soon enable users to unsend encrypted messages and sync deleted communications across devices in a different experiment.

By 2023, Meta plans to have end-to-end encryption protection enabled by default across all of its apps, according to a statement made last year.