Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has delayed its plans to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) by default on Messenger and Instagram until 2023, according to reports.
The company launched the new Messenger experience on Instagram, allowing cross-platform messaging for users last year in a bid to create a unified messaging system across all its platforms.
While messages sent through Messenger and Instagram can be end-to-end encrypted, the option is not turned on by default. E2EE is unlikely to arrive before 2023, according to a Guardian report
Antigone Davis, the head of safety at Meta, announced in a post in the Sunday Telegraph that the encryption process would take place in 2023.
Davis had attributed the delay to the company’s efforts “to get this right.”
“We don’t plan to finish the global roll-out of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023,” Davis wrote as quoted by the report.
Previously, the company had said E2EE will arrive for Messenger and Instagram Direct “sometime in 2022 at the earliest.”
“We’re also working hard to bring default end-to-end encryption to all of our messaging services. This will protect people’s private messages and mean only the sender and recipient, not even us, can access their messages,” Meta had said in a blog post earlier this year.
“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,” it had said.
WhatsApp messages are already end-to-end encrypted by default. Additionally, the social media major is also planning to unify the infrastructure Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram Direct, reports said.
