Facebook Messenger doesn’t yet offer end-to-end encryption for your messages, and here’s why.
Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging applications in the world. It has over a billion active users every month, however, unlike WhatsApp and some of its alternatives that encrypt your messages by default, Facebook Messenger does not.
This means that your messages can be intercepted by third parties And technically even Facebook, which could pose a huge privacy issue. If this is so, Why doesn’t Facebook encrypt your chats? Y Why should you care that they don’t? Well, in this article you will find the answers, so you can not stop reading until the end.
What is end-to-end encryption?
Chat encryption can come in different forms, but this time we will not focus on the so-called end-to-end encryption. Is about a process of encoding the data in a message to prevent anyone other than the sender or receiver from viewing it. This protocol is used by messaging services to protect the privacy of messages sent by their users.
This also ensures that your messages are unreadable to anyone other than you and the person you are chatting with. There are several chat apps with end-to-end encryption, including iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp, among others. But there are other messaging services that do not offer this level of protection by default, and Facebook Messenger is one of them.
Why Facebook Messenger chats are not end-to-end encrypted
One of the main strengths of Facebook Messenger is that it can be accessed from almost any device. You can log into your account through any device with an internet connection and get immediate access to all your messages.
However, this ease of access is also the reason why Messenger chats cannot, for now at least, be encrypted by default. The other Facebook-owned instant messaging platforms offer end-to-end encryption because users often access them with a single device. Unlike Messenger, where you can have your accounts registered on several devices simultaneously.
Facebook knows this is a problem that needs to be fixed
Enabling end-to-end encryption on chats by default while maintaining current ease of access is hard work, and Facebook has no problem supporting it. Gail Kent, Messenger’s policy director, admitted in a Facebook newsroom post that she already they are working on the encryption of Messenger chats and Instagram direct messages by default, but they won’t do it anytime soon.
The company has said that while they hope to advance further in end-to-end encryption by default for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, it is a long-term project and won’t be ready until 2022 at the earliest. In addition, the security features that have already been introduced are designed to work with end-to-end encryption, and they plan to continue incorporating robust security features into their services.
Worried? You don’t have to be. If you are concerned about the privacy of your Messenger conversations, there is a feature in the app that you can use to have encrypted chats. It’s called secret conversations and here we tell you everything you need to know about this feature.
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