Key Points
Meta has had to stake out a position as a committed proponent of end-to-end encryption amid pressure from law enforcement and victim advocacy groups that the privacy featurewhich makes data unintelligible everywhere except on the devices of the sender and recipientlimits necessary oversight and impedes crucial police investigations..
Meanwhile, the company has spent the past four years, not to mention the better part of a decade, developing the technology to retrofit two massive communication platformsMessenger and Instagram chatsuch that they could still offer the features and general experience users expect under the technical constraints and usability challenges of end-to-end encryption...
Meta says that it will take some time for the rollout of full default end-to-end encryption to reach all Messenger and Instagram chat users, and the feature is still only launching for direct messages between two accounts..
With these considerations in mind, Meta engineers developed an encrypted storage protocol, dubbed Labyrinth, that allows the company to store users' chat histories and other communication data on its servers for ease of use, but in a form that is always encrypted and inaccessible to the company...
Meta's engineers have spent a huge amount of time over the past four years re-architecting more than 100 Messenger and Instagram chat features so they interoperate with end-to-end encryption and seem to function the same way they always haveeven if they're working differently on a technical level under the hood..
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