GoKawiilMeta 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.
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