The Facebook team is testing introducing into the Messenger app an encrypted feature that will make the messages visible only by the sender and the recipient.
According to Bustle, this new feature will ensure that for each message the Facebook Messenger App would restrict each person to one device and the end-to-end encryption would only work for the Android and iOS apps, not the desktop or web versions of Messenger. Facebook explained on a blog post that some of the more visual aspects of the Messenger app will not be available with the encrypted feature.
Secret conversations currently do not support popular Messenger features such as rich content, videos and GIFs or making payments. The encrypted messages would be inaccessible to members of law enforcement or to anyone at Facebook. According to Inquisitr, messages may even be set up with a timer to users eventually disappears after being sent.
At the moment, the Messenger end-to-end encryption new feature is available to users on a "limited basis." Facebook is testing the "secret conversation" feature on restricted groups of users in order to gather data about what users think of it and the feature's performance. The social media network plans to roll out the secret conversations feature to more users before the end of the summer.
According to TechWorm, Facebook's Messenger application is not the first to introduce end-to-end encryption. WhatsApp, also owned by Facebook, introduced a similar feature for all methods of communication on that platform, including texts, calls, photos and videos.
The secret conversations function uses a communication protocol released previously and called Signal. This is a free and open source software that has been already implemented in other messaging apps, including Google Allo and WhatsApp.
The Washington Times reports that Facebook aims to provide its users a way of communicating in a manner intended to make correspondence undecipherable to anyone other than the sender and recipient, by implementing the new end-to-end encryption feature. But this possibility is alarming for the law enforcement agencies.
