After WhatsApp, Meta is looking forward to introduce a bunch of privacy features in messenger, experts believe that this update is reaction to the Nebraska abortion case, the tech giant however denies and calls it unrelated
Social Media Giant ‘Meta’, just this morning announced to increase privacy on Messenger, the primary part of which is including an end to end encryption on the messaging platform. Meta’s testing of the end-to-end encryption feature on Messenger comes at a weird timing since the company just provided user data to a US court currently working on an abortion case.
While Meta providing courts with the users personal conversations was them following a court order, critics and social media experts have another take on this. Many say that if Messenger had an end to end encryption, then getting personal user data wouldn’t be possible for the company, now the important thing is that Meta has been promising end-to-end encryption on Messenger for a long time, but the case only went on to highlight the absence of it.
The absence of an end to end encryption in Messenger resulted in users criticizing Meta, but now only days after the abortion case, the company has started testing end-to-end encryption on the platform. Meta, however in their statement has denied the Nebraska abortion case and their testing to have any connection and called them both totally unrelated.
Meta first announced the arrival of full-scale end-to-end encryption, way back in 2016. In 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg also announced the implementation of end-to-end encryption on all of Meta’s platforms. Despite all the announcements Messenger failed to get the feature for one reason or the other. Currently, the company has set a goal of delivering default end-to-end encryption for personal messages by 2023.
When asked about the testing having connections with the Nebraska abortion case, a Meta spokesperson named Alex Dziedzan said that “This is not a response to any law enforcement requests. We’ve had this date in the diary for months, but the short notice is because Messenger product teams have been finalizing the tests that are going live. These tests will start. We want people to hear about these tests from us before they see changes in the app.”
Currently, the company is on a slow march towards Messenger end-to-end encryption and has been slowly testing different encryption features. Just this week, the company has plans to increase the number of people with automatic encryption turned on, which means that they won’t have to go inside their settings to turn them on.
