Why It Took Meta 7 Years to Turn on End-to-End Encryption for All Chats

Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. It’s not just that we’re migrating people’s data, but it’s actually that we're having to fundamentally change a bunch of the assumptions that they work with when they’re using the product.” Meta has had to stake out a position as a committed proponent of end-to-end encryption amid pressure from law enforcement and victim advocacy groups that the privacy feature—which makes data unintelligible everywhere except on the devices of the sender and recipient—limits necessary oversight and impedes crucial police investigations. Meanwhile, the company has spent the past four years, not to mention the better part of a decade, developing the technology to retrofit two massive communication platforms—Messenger and Instagram chat—such that they could still offer the features and general experience users expect under the technical constraints and usability challenges of end-to-end encryption. “I understand that many people don't think Facebook can or would even want to build this kind of privacy-focused platform—because frankly, we don't currently have a strong reputation for building privacy-protective services, and we've historically focused on tools for more open sharing,” Zuckerberg memorably wrote in his 2019 treatise. Meta says that it will take some time for the rollout of full default end-to-end encryption to reach all Messenger and Instagram chat users, and the feature is still only launching for direct messages between two accounts.