Meta Says It Is Removing End-to-End Encryption From Instagram Direct Messages ⇥ about.fb.com

In March 2019, Mark Zuckerberg announced his “privacy-focused vision for social networking”.

This did not come out of nowhere. Facebook is a technology firm hostile to user privacy, and media coverage has reflected its poor record. The company had even been pursuing a deal to operate in China and accept that government’s surveillance and censorship demands. So it decided to make some changes. It ended its plan for operating in China — not because it no longer wanted that massive audience, but because it was easier to lobby for a U.S. TikTok ban.

It also decided on six principles for that “privacy-focused vision”, among them:

Encryption. People’s private communications should be secure. End-to-end encryption prevents anyone — including us — from seeing what people share on our services.

Zuckerberg noted some of the risks for end-to-end encryption, but “[o]n balance,” Zuckerberg wrote, “I believe working towards implementing end-to-end encryption for all private communications is the right thing to do”. As a result, Meta’s Sara Su announced in August 2022 that the company would begin testing it in two key applications:

People want to trust that their online conversations with friends and family are private and secure. We’re working hard to protect your personal messages and calls with end-to-end encryption by default on Messenger and Instagram. […]

To Meta’s credit, Messenger defaulted to end-to-end encryption in December 2023. But the company has never flipped the switch for Instagram.

Earlier this week in a note appended to the top of Su’s post, the company said it was ending this pursuit:

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. You can keep messaging with end-to-end encryption easily on WhatsApp.

I am not sure if it is worth reading anything into the explicit callout of WhatsApp but not Messenger.

In any case, this is another one of those fleeting Zuckerberg obsessions that is only relevant so long as it serves a media relations purpose. Of course not many people opted into end-to-end encryption — that is the whole point of the power of defaults, and something users should not have to think about. This is not an outright rejection of end-to-end encryption, given Meta’s support in other apps, but it is no longer important because it is a few trends behind.

This is now an artificial intelligence company. Do not ask what “Meta” means. It is not important either.