Meta Delays Encrypted Messages on Facebook and Instagram To 2023

The owner of Facebook and Instagram is delaying plans to encrypt users' messages until 2023 amid warnings from child safety campaigners that its proposals would shield abusers from detection. From a report: Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire has been under pressure to abandon its encryption plans, which the UK home secretary, Priti Patel, has described as 'simply not acceptable.' The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has said private messaging is the 'frontline of child sexual abuse online' because it prevents law enforcement, and tech platforms, from seeing messages by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can view their content -- a process known as end-to-end encryption. The head of safety at Facebook and Instagram's parent company, Meta, announced that the encryption process would take place in 2023. The company had previously said the change would happen in 2022 at the earliest.

'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. '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.' Meta already uses end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service and had been planning to extend that to its Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. It has already encrypted voice and video calls on Messenger. Announcing the privacy drive in 2019, Zuckerberg, said: 'People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they've sent them to -- not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they're using.'

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