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..
You might be interested in
End-to-End Encrypted Instagram and Messenger Chats: Why It Took Meta 7 Years
07, Dec, 23Mark Zuckerberg personally promised that the privacy feature would launch by default on Messenger and Instagram chat. WIRED goes behind the scenes of the company’s colossal effort to get it right.
Meta to Start Fully Encrypting Messages on Facebook and Instagram
07, Dec, 23Social-media giant is moving ahead with a privacy measure that government officials and others have warned could hide illegal activity by child predators and other criminals.
FTC proposes ban on Meta profiting from minors' data
04, May, 23The U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Wednesday accused Meta's Facebook of misleading parents about protections for children and proposed tightening an existing agreement on privacy to include a ban on making money from minors' data.
US regulator says Meta putting child users at risk
03, May, 23The Federal Trade Commission says it wants to stop Facebook's owner from making money out of children.
Your smart watch isn't a medical device - but it is tracking all your health data
26, Feb, 24For millions of people, smartwatches aren't just a piece of technology. They can use them to take control of their health in ways never...
Facebook Finally Puts a Price on Privacy: It’s $10 a Month
01, Nov, 23Meta is about to roll out ad-free subscriptions on Instagram and Facebook. But critics say privacy should not be turned into a luxury.
A ‘Recipe for Disaster’: Insiders Warned Meta’s Privacy Push Would Shield Child Predators
22, Dec, 23The company’s own child-safety experts sounded the alarm about efforts to encrypt messages on Instagram and Facebook. This month, it started doing it anyway.