Instagram, Facebook Messenger not to get this WhatsApp-like safety feature

Meta, earlier this year, had announced that it would introduce end-to-end encryption -- the technology that protects conversations on WhatsApp -- on Instagram and on Facebook Messenger by 2022. “While we expect to make more progress on default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, it’s a long-term project and we won’t be fully end-to-end encrypted until sometime in 2022 at the earliest,” the company had said in a blog post earlier this year. But now word is that Meta is not planning to introduce end-to-end encryption also known as E2E encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram until 2023.

The Guardian reports that Facebook and Instagram’s head of safety in a post on The Telegraph has said that the encryption process would take place in 2023. “We’re taking our time to get this right and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph (via The Guardian.

“As a company that connects billions of people around the world and has built industry-leading technology, we’re determined to protect people’s private communications and keep people safe online,” he added in the post.

In the same post, Davis also said that one of the outcomes of the slower introduction of end-to-end encryption would be that the company will be able to detect abuse by using non-encrypted data, account information and reports from users. The company is already using a similar technique for WhatsApp to make reports to child safety authorities.

Notably, Meta, according to a report by The New York Times, had merged Instagram chats and Messenger in a bid to create a unified messaging platform -- something that the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had mentioned almost two and a half years ago. At the time, the report had also said that while the three messaging apps would remain separate, their underlying infrastructure would be unified, which in turn would enable end-to-end encryption as a default option in the three messaging apps, that is, Facebook Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, which has been using this technology for long. Meta was earlier planning to introduce end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Messenger in 2022. But now, they have been delayed until 2023.