Meta claimed for years that it was technically challenging to implement end-to-end encryption across Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs, but back in 2023 said that it had resolved those issues.
Unfortunately, the company has now made a U-turn on Instagram direct messages, and that’s bad news for all of us …
A quick recap
Meta had been working on making end-to-end encryption (E2EE) standard for Facebook Messenger since 2019. The company said at the time that this was a non-trivial task.
It quickly became apparent that transitioning our services to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and challenging engineering puzzle. We would have to rewrite almost the entire messaging and calling code base from scratch.
However, the rollout started in August 2023 and was complete by the end of that year.
The company claimed that E2EE for Instagram DMs would follow. That did eventually happen, but only as an opt-in feature hidden deep within the settings menus. Hardly anyone knew it was there and therefore hardly anyone used it.
Now being switched off
What was needed, of course, was to apply E2EE by default rather than requiring users to manually activate it. Instead, as we reported last week, the company has switched it off altogether.
“Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months,” a Meta spokesperson told WIRED and other outlets.
As Wired notes, that is profoundly disingenuous.
“Designed the feature so nobody could find it, killed it for not being easy enough to find and, therefore, unpopular. It’s deeply cynical,” says Davi Ottenheimer, a longtime security executive.
9to5Mac’s Take
Fortunately, Apple has a good track record at standing up to governments on this issue, even going so far as to threaten to pull iMessage out of the UK market rather than compromise privacy. The British government responded by backing down.
However, none of us get to choose the messaging apps our friends use. Most of us have multiple apps because different friends choose different platforms. The fact that Meta has made a U-turn on this already puts the privacy of some of our messages at risk, and it also creates an extremely unwelcome precedent for other tech companies that may take a similarly cowardly approach to government pressure.
Photo by Azamat E on Unsplash
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