Facebook has added message encryption to Messenger and Instagram (but you will have to activate it manually)

With the prolonged pandemic, online communication has become more and more a part of people's lives. The security of this communication has become one of the cornerstones for many people-to-people companies. It would seem that Facebook should be the flagship of this movement, given the company's user base, but now the largest social network is just catching up with its competitors.

On Friday, Facebook announced that end-to-end encryption for voice and video calls made in the Messenger app is effective immediately. There's just one caveat: you must choose to activate encryption, meaning your calls will theoretically be vulnerable to data interception if you don't take advantage of this new feature.

For those unaware of the digital privacy debate, the editorial staff at gg feels it is our duty to explain that endpoint encryption is a type of protection that ensures that only the sender and recipient of a message can see it.

Facebook takes the same approach to Messenger text chats, designating them as "Secret Conversations" in the app and making their activation as confusing as possible. Because encryption is not enabled by default, many chats in Messenger are probably less secure than they could be. The same is likely to threaten voice and video calls.

In addition, encrypted conversations get advanced message disappearance options. Messenger has for some time now allowed users to set messages to disappear in 1-hour or 24-hour intervals. This range has now been expanded to a minimum of 5 seconds.

Source: Facebook