Facebook continues to cast doubt on the privacy and security of its services, with Instagram and Facebook Messenger still unencrypted.
Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct chats won’t be encrypted at least until the end of 2022
Many massive data leaks and several controversies derived from them, including changes in WhatsApp’s Terms of Service, it seems that Facebook continues with its roadmap without paying too much attention to the criticism received for its privacy policies, and it seems that improvements in this regard are not a priority in the Menlo Park offices.
Some industry experts are commenting on XDA-developers that the encryption of messages between users will not be ready in the short term, at least if we look at Facebook Messenger and Instagram, although it is an almost necessary and mandatory option to protect the information shared by people using these services.
Even Facebook itself acknowledges concern among its ranks, but in an announcement of new security and safety plans published in the last few hours, Mark Zuckerberg‘s own company states that end-to-end encryption, for example, will not arrive at least during this year 2021, forcing us to wait many months yet:
While we expect to move further with default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct, this is a long-term project and we won’t be fully ready to end-to-end encrypt conversations until 2022 at the earliest. In addition, the security features we have already introduced are designed to work with E2E encryption, and we will continue to build robust security features into our services.
Facebook is working on encryption but seems to have other priorities
Facebook claims to be working on a lot of new developments related to privacy and security, but without offering more data and announcing that it will not encrypt its end-to-end messages in Messenger and Instagram at least until next year, 2022, with many months still ahead and the communications of its users circulating on the network without end-to-end protection of any kind.
It should be noted that WhatsApp does have this type of encryption, after years of fierce requests from its users, and also that Facebook Messenger does have this important functionality by switching to “secret conversation” mode, where in addition to encrypting messages some functions of the service are disabled.
Instagram for its part has not implemented any type of encryption yet, and that from California had confirmed that it would be implemented both in Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram back in 2019 without offering more than this promise.
It is curious that Facebook, with so much criticism in its backpack, continues to prioritize other developments instead of finally implementing end-to-end encryption and with it the protection of its users’ communications, since they have been working on it for two years now without having seen much progress either in this regard or in the unified infrastructure they promised.
And this infrastructure is indeed complex, but other services such as Signal and Telegram offer E2E privacy almost since their birth, and the exodus of users from Facebook’s messaging services to other alternatives has not ceased in recent times precisely because of these problems and the continuous changes in the Terms of Service announced from Menlo Park… Will they continue to sustain the loss of users?
