Meta plans to add encryption to Messenger, sparking privacy debate
Meta said Wednesday it plans to turn Messenger, the global chat and voicemail app, into a fully encrypted service, a move that will reinvigorate the debate over privacy and security in communications.
The Silicon Valley company, which also owns Facebook and Instagram, said the change is part of an overhaul intended to make Messenger more like other messaging apps, such as Apple’s iMessage and Meta’s other messaging service, WhatsApp.
End-to-end encryption is a method of keeping texts, photos, videos and phone calls private so that third parties cannot access the content. The technology scrambles messages so that only the sender and intended recipient can decipher them.
“The extra layer of security provided by end-to-end encryption means the contents of your messages and calls with friends and family are protected from the moment they leave your device to the moment they reach the recipient’s device” , says Loredana Crisan, a vice president of Messenger, said in a message. “This means that no one, including Meta, can see what is sent or said unless you choose to report a message to us.”
Law enforcement authorities and technologists have been discussing encryption controls for decades. On the one hand, privacy advocates and tech executives believe that people should be able to communicate online without snooping. On the other hand, law enforcement and other authorities believe that strict encryption makes it impossible to track child predators, terrorists and other criminals.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has been positioning himself as a privacy champion for some time. In 2019, he announced a plan to merge and encrypt all of his company’s messaging apps, a move that took years of technical infrastructure work. At the time, he recognized the risk this posed for “really terrible things like child exploitation.”
Meta’s messaging services have come under particularly strict scrutiny in Europe lately, where the company has been fined billions of euros for violating data privacy laws. Lawmakers have also criticized Meta for not allowing its messaging services to easily interoperate with other services such as iMessage and Telegram, and have ordered the company to make it possible send a message from Meta’s apps to competing apps.
Meta recently reduced the number of trust and security staff working on issues such as tackling disinformation and catching child predators, suppliers of exploitation materials or drug and arms traffickers.
End-to-end encryption gained traction in 2013 after data leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden appeared to reveal the extent to which the NSA and other intelligence and law enforcement agencies operate through companies accessed the communications of users such as Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and Facebook without their knowledge.
Encrypted messaging apps like Signal became increasingly popular, and tech giants like Apple started wrapping user data in end-to-end encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp introduced full encryption to its service.
In the United States, regulators have said the increasing use of encryption in messaging apps has facilitated criminal behavior and child predation by keeping messages out of the reach of law enforcement agencies.
In a rack in April, the Virtual Global Task Force, a group of 15 law enforcement agencies including Interpol and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said Meta’s decision to encrypt its messaging services is “an example of a deliberate design choice that degrades security systems and weakens the ability to keep child users safe hold.”
In addition to end-to-end encryption, Messenger is planning other new features, including a notification that lets you know if someone has opened and read your message and the ability to send voice memos, make messages disappear after 24 hours, and edit sent messages . Messenger users send more than 1.3 billion photos and videos per day on the app.