Facebook Messenger end-to-end encryption delayed
Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, has delayed its plans to roll out full end-to-end encryption to Instagram and Facebook Messenger, The Guardian has reported.
The report comes after a commentary from Meta’s head of safety Antigone Davis for the Sunday Telegraph. He said the global rollout of default end-to-end encryption on the company’s platforms would happen in 2023.
“We’re taking our time to get this right, and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” Davis said.
Previously, the company said the changes would take effect in 2022.
Meta already offers end-to-end encryption by default on WhatsApp chats and calls, but Facebook Messenger and Instagram require users to choose to start an encrypted conversation.
The company is amidst a push towards encryption and other privacy-focused features, which it first announced in 2019.
At the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that “people expected their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they’ve sent them to — not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they’re using”.
The move would seem logical given that Meta’s platforms have been heavily criticised for how they handle users’ data.
It recently faced severe backlash from WhatsApp users after a privacy policy change that would allow it to share certain information from business chats across its other platforms.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg
However, full encryption of messaging services has one major pitfall — it can help facilitate communication for illegal activities.
Meta has been under immense pressure from lawmakers and civil action groups, who have warned that end-to-end encryption makes it easy for human traffickers and child abusers to hide from detection.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has described private messaging as the “frontline of child sexual abuse online”.
In October 2020, it was revealed that 94% of 69 million child abuse images referred by US tech firms to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2019 were from Facebook’s platforms.
If end-to-end encryption functions as intended, with only the sender and receiver able to see a message, it would conceal these types of messages from Facebook and law enforcement agencies.
Privacy-focused Apple is facing a similar conundrum on the opposite end of the privacy spectrum.
Apple had to delay the implementation of its child abuse scanning feature for iCloud photos and videos after privacy advocates and users expressed concern that governments would pressure Apple to expand the scope of the scanner, potentially putting a dangerous tool in the hands of oppressive regimes.
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