Facebook, Instagram Postpone Message Encryption Feature To 2023

San Francisco: The plans to encrypt users’ messages have been delayed by Meta-owned Facebook Messenger and Instagram till 2023.

“We are 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,” Meta’s head of safety, Antigone Davis wrote in The Telegraph, London.

“As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we’re determined to protect people’s private communications and keep people safe online,” he further wrote.

With the E2EE feature allowing only the sender and recipient to see their conversations, the company wants to ensure that the feature does not interfere with the platform’s ability to help stop criminal activity.

It was back in 2016, Facebook had first rolled out encryption to its Messenger service, but the feature only works when users opt for the Secret Conversation feature on the service.

Meta had said earlier this year that default E2EE would be available on Instagram and Messenger “sometime in 2022 at the earliest.”

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