Meta Aims to Encrypt All Facebook Messenger Chats

Today, Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced that it would begin testing default end-to-end encryption for its popular chat client, Messenger. End-to-end encryption is the process by which messages between two parties are encoded so they can’t be intercepted and read by an outside entity, not even the service provider.

While the ability to encrypt your Messenger apps has been available on the platform since 2016, if this testing succeeds, end-to-end encryption will become the automatic standard for all chats across Meta properties. If you want that security standard in your Messenger chats now, you need to turn it on manually.

In a statement released through its online newsroom, Meta Product Management Director, Sara Su, detailed the new features Messenger encryption features users can expect to roll out in the coming weeks. These include end-to-end encrypted chats, the ability to unsend messages, a code verification browser extension, and more.

If Meta implements end-to-end encryption by default in Messenger, it will become the one of the most-used chat apps to employ that security standard. Other apps that use end-to-end encryption include Signal, Telegram, and WhatsApp (also owned by Meta).