Messenger’s Encrypted Chats to be Available to More People Before Full Release in 2021
Meta has announced that it will be significantly expanding the encryption feature of Messenger, making it accessible to “millions more people’s chats” starting today. The company plans to make end-to-end encryption (E2EE) the standard for all users by the end of 2023. Meta also acknowledged the complexity and challenges involved in implementing this transition, referring to it as an intricate engineering puzzle.
The system protects conversations from eavesdropping and interception using public key encryption technology – no one, not even law enforcement, can access the conversations. At the same time, your message history is also encrypted. Meta first focused on WhatsApp, which now offers full E2EE, but Messenger will have the same level of security by the end of the year.
However, getting there was apparently not easy. “It quickly became clear that moving our services to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and challenging engineering task,” the company wrote. “Not only did we have to move to a new server architecture, but we also had to rewrite our code base to run on multiple devices instead of just a server.”
Citing the example of YouTube’s rich preview, Meta said its servers currently retrieve URL information and then display a video preview in Messenger chat. However, with E2EE, the application visits the shared URL, retrieves the relevant image and text data, and then sends it. This slows the process down a touch, but it means users still get the full feature set, but with the privacy of encryption.
Meta said it is also testing recovery of encrypted conversations on the device, which requires users to set a PIN or generate a code. It is also experimenting with the possibility of saving conversations to cloud storage services such as iCloud. In the meantime, Meta completes its E2EE trifecta by introducing it to Instagram DMs by the end of 2023.
This effectively catches the company off guard with services like Signal and brings end-to-end encryption fully into the mainstream. It could also draw the ire of nations such as Spain, which has advocated banning encryption in the European Union, ostensibly as a way to stop the spread of child sexual exploitation material (CSAM) and other criminal activity.
