Being one of the most attractive qualities of WhatsApp, even despite the still known security incidents, the end-to-end encryption function (or E2EE) that Meta began to prepare for the rest of its applications such as Instagram or Messenger, has to be delayed again.
And it is that although it should have arrived last May 2021, now the company has returned to pronounce itself through an official statement published on its blog to confirm that this function not available until 2022At the earliest, some media even point to 2023.
«While we expect to make further progress on the default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, It is a long-term project and we won’t be fully end-to-end encrypted until 2022 at the earliest»Says the statement,«Additionally, the security features we have already introduced are designed to work with end-to-end encryption, and we plan to continue adding robust security features in our services«.
So, on the one hand, it seems that part of this delay could be due to to the recent change of name and orientation of Meta (formerly Facebook), and his new interest in the metaverse. Although the delay could be more related to significant opposition from law enforcement and child safety advocates, as these features could in some way help hide potential illegal communications from authorities.
Antigone Davis, head of security at Meta, explained that the reason was security concerns, as Facebook did not want to make it difficult to track criminals:
«We need to find a balance between security, privacy and security. We talked about tools that can protect people’s privacy while preventing harm from happening in the first place, using behavioral signals, traffic data, or user reports instead of accessing the content of all messages.«.
In this way, it is expected that the new E2EE functions «use a combination of unencrypted data in our applications, account information and user reports«, Ensuring the privacy of users while«helps public safety efforts«.
