Facebook End-to-End Encryption Could Take One Year Or More

Although Facebook has been working on end-to-end encryption for its services for years, the Messenger and Instagram chats have not yet received the feature. The company used to tell its users that it will not compromise on end-to-end encryption but this commitment seems to have a long delay. The group has now announced that the two applications will not be available until 2022 at the earliest.

As Facebook writes in an official blog post, the end-to-end encryption for Messenger is supposed to be a long-term project. However, the security upgrade should not be fully integrated into the application until next year or even later. First, the developers want to implement other functions first.

Encryption only via secret chats

If you use Facebook Messenger or the Instagram chats recently merged with the service and want to start an encrypted conversation, you have the option of calling up a secret chat. However, certain functions cannot be used in secret conversations that have been in the program since 2016. In normal conversations, only the connection between a client and the Facebook servers is encrypted.

Since other services have been offering end-to-end encryption for a long time and are struggling with fewer data protection problems, messengers such as Signal and Telegram were able to lure numerous users away from Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Better encryption could help the social media group win back users. Why Facebook only gives the feature a low priority seems incomprehensible.