Goal He announced it last March and has already made it a reality. Since last Friday, End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is no longer available for direct messages on Instagram and, if that worries you, the solution, according to the company Mark Zuckerbergthe thing is use WhatsApp.
The reason end-to-end encryption on Instagram is gone is because ‘very few people’ used it. This is not a surprise, since the function required manual activation by the user and was hidden in the chat settings, so you had to activate it in every conversation. Come on, a nuisance that suggests that Meta didn’t really want it to be used.
The company’s official stance is that anyone who wants end-to-end encrypted chats can, simply, switch to WhatsApp and that anyone ‘affected by this change’ will see instructions on how to download any media or messages you want to keep.
E2EE assumes that only the sender and recipient can decode and read a messageprotecting it from hackers, security forces and even the platform that hosts the chat. Although end-to-end encryption on Instagram is gone, all chats will still be protected with encryption in transit. This protects your data as it travels between your device and Meta’s servers, but it means that the company can access the content of your direct messages.
End-to-end encryption used to be seen as a positive for user privacy and a strength of apps with messaging features that benefited and protected them, but that trend is changing.
The E2EE has received strong criticism in recent years from child protection groups, security forces and authorities from different countries, who maintain that can make it difficult to detect abuse, police investigations and cases of child exploitation.
A lawsuit filed by the New Mexico attorney general revealed internal documents from 2019 that showed the person responsible for Meta Content Policy, Monika Bickertwarning his team that E2EE would prevent the company from detecting child exploitation. He wrote in a chat that ‘we are about to do something bad as a company. This is very irresponsible’.
two months ago, TikTok confirmed that it will never add E2EE to its direct messagesa decision that received applause from child protection advocates. The company argued that keeping messages readable on its servers is a necessary security feature because its platform has a strong presence of young users. Like Instagram, TikTok uses standard encryption to protect messages.