Facebook has received a lot of criticism because of the company’s monopoly on messaging and social networks in some countries, and because of Facebook’s obscene track record with user privacy and data. The company is slowly moving to improve its public perception, and one aspect of it – encrypting messages between users without changing any settings – is never ready.
Facebook first released end-to-end encryption in its messenger app in 2016, although this is only available by switching to ‘secret conversation’ mode, which prevents certain features from working.
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Instagram does not create end-to-end encryption for messages and is also testing features that do not work on E2E connections (such as sending messages on desktops). Facebook says it will add E2E encryption to Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram in 2019.
The company revealed earlier that year that the three platforms would be transformed into integrated infrastructure, allowing cross-communication between the three services.
Facebook today announced updates on its security and security plans in a blog post. The post focuses primarily on the study and privacy interview results, but what is embedded in the text is unclear about the status of end-to-end encryption on Facebook’s platforms:
While we expect to make more progress on default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, it’s a long-term project and we won’t be fully end-to-end encrypted until sometime in 2022 at the earliest. Moreover, the safety features we’ve already introduced are designed to work with end-to-end encryption, and we plan to continue building strong safety features into our services.
It may come as a bit of a surprise that Facebook is taking years to implement end-to-end encryption in all its services, especially as planned in early 2019. It is difficult to add the infrastructure and client-side software needed to manage E2E on many platforms. , But Facebook seems to be prioritizing other features.
Meanwhile, other messaging services such as Signal and Telegram continue to steal users from Facebook services, largely due to company privacy. Despite being at the top of the free apps on Instagram, WhatsApp, and the Facebook Messenger Play Store two apps have received a spike in downloads following disputes over WhatsApp’s terms of service.
//Via
