After a high-profile incident in which subpoenaed Facebook messages led to felony charges for a 17-year-old girl and her mother in a Nebraska abortion case, Meta said Thursday that it would expand testing of end-to-end encryption in Messenger ahead of a planned global rollout.
This week, the company will automatically begin to add end-to-end encryption in Messenger chats for more people. In the coming weeks, it will also increase the number of people who can begin using end-to-end encrypt on direct messages in Instagram. Meanwhile, the company has begun to test a feature called “secure storage” that will allow users to restore their chat history when they install Messenger on a new device. Backups can be locked by a PIN, and the feature is designed to prevent the company or anyone else from being able to read their contents.
Meta told Wired that it had long planned to make these announcements, and that the fact that they came so soon after the abortion case came to light was a coincidence. I’m less interested in the timing, though, than the practical challenges of making encrypt messaging the default for hundreds of millions of people. In recent conversations with Meta employees, I’ve come to understand more about what’s taking so long and how consumer apathy toward encryption has created challenges for the company as it works to create a secure messaging app that its user base will actually use.
Source: This news is originally published by theverge