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| Meta delays encrypted messages via Facebook and Instagram |
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, has postponed plans to encrypt user messages until 2023 as child protection activists warned that his proposal could protect attackers from detection.
Mark Zuckerberg's social media empire is under pressure to abandon an encryption scheme, which British Home Secretary Priti Patel believes is unacceptable.
The National League for the Prevention of Child Abuse said private information online is at the forefront of child sexual abuse because it prevents law enforcement and technology platforms from seeing the information by ensuring that only the sender and recipient can see the content.
Meta's chief security officer has announced that the encryption will take place in 2023. The company previously announced that the change would happen as early as 2022.
"We are taking the time to make sure everything is running smoothly," Antigone Davis wrote in the Sunday Telegraph. We have no plans to introduce end-to-end encryption as a standard across all of our email services worldwide by 2023.
As a company that connects billions of people around the world with the latest technology, we are committed to protecting people's private communications and keeping them safe online.
The company uses end-to-end encryption via the WhatsApp messaging service. It is planned to expand to Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. After encrypted voice and video calls via Messenger.
“People want their private communications to be secure,” Zuckerberg said in 2019. Only the person who sent it can see it, but hackers, criminals, governments and even the people who run the services they use can see it. You can't see it. .
2.8 billion people use the meta app every day
2.8 billion people use enterprise apps every day. In 2020, the tech industry submitted more than 21 million reports confirming child sexual abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children on its global platform. More than 20 million of these reports come from Facebook.
Davis said that Meta was able to detect misuse under the encryption system. Use unencrypted data, account information, and user reports.
A similar method via WhatsApp makes it possible to send reports to child safety authorities. "Our recent review of some of the historical cases shows that we can still provide important information to the authorities," she said. These services are also end-to-end encrypted.
Patel is a vocal opponent of the Meta Project. As a result, it said in April that a situation that compromises the ability to deal with crime and protect victims should not be allowed.
Additionally, the Head of Child Safety Policy at the National Society for the Prevention of Child Abuse welcomed this decision. "Facebook is right not to promote end-to-end encryption," he said. This way, they have a proper plan to prevent child abuse being detected on their platform.