If you’re on Instagram, you probably use the social network to send and receive messages from friends, family, and co-workers. Meta has plans to provide extra protection for these communications with end-to-end encryption. The feature is expected to arrive later in 2023 to Facebook Messenger, and Instagram should receive it soon after.
The company aims to release end-to-end encryption by the end of 2023 on Messenger, a messaging app linked to Facebook. Soon after that, it would be Instagram’s turn.
That is: depending on when it comes to Messenger, it is quite possible that the protection will be available on Instagram later this year.
By then, testing of end-to-end encryption in Messenger will be expanded and more people will have access to this protection. The distribution is random and does not have a negative impact on the experience, the company guarantees.
The information is in a letter sent by Meta to the digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future. The document is signed by Rob Sherman, the company’s privacy executive.
Technical Challenges Delayed Encryption, Says Meta
Meta has been working on end-to-end encryption for Instagram and Facebook Messenger since 2021. The plan was to deliver the protection in 2022. Then the deadline was extended to 2023. So far, nothing, but the Goal guarantees that it will release.
In the August 2023 paper, Sherman reveals that the tests took longer than imagined for two reasons.
The first is that the engineering work required to prepare servers to transmit encrypted messages is complex.
The second is that Meta had to rebuild security tools and app features to work with end-to-end encryption.
On the company’s blog, there are more details about this technical part. In short, Meta’s servers ensured that both sides of the conversation were seeing the same thing.
With end-to-end encryption, this is not possible—only participants have access to the content.
In addition, the company needed to develop a way for the user to be able to access their message history through a PIN.
On the resources and experience side, some things will also change. The devices will need to deal with tasks that were previously solved by the servers, such as fetching previews of YouTube links, for example.
WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption
While Messenger and Instagram await privacy protection, it’s available in another Meta app: WhatsApp.
In end-to-end encryption, the message leaves the encrypted sender and can only be decrypted on the recipient’s device, which has a key to be able to access the content.
Even if the communication is intercepted, it cannot be read without the keys on both sides of the conversation.
