Meta expands testing for end-to-end encryption on Messenger

Meta news: Meta has announced that it is expanding testing for end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on Messenger. "Starting today, millions more people's chats on Messenger will be upgraded to stronger encryption standards as part of our ongoing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) testing," Timothy Buck, Product Manager at Messenger, said in a blog post on Tuesday. "We remain on track to launch default E2EE for one-to-one friends and family chats on Messenger by the end of the year." With E2EE, the platform aims to enhance the security it already provides and give users additional confidence that their personal messages will remain private.

Buck further mentioned that the platform is learning lessons from the WhatsApp engineering team on how to deliver messages on a huge scale and at high speed in an E2EE environment. "A valuable lesson we've learned is it needs to be scalable and reliable, and be as simple and lightweight as possible," he added. Also, streamlining the complexity of Messenger creates a better outcome, particularly for people who have low connectivity. In order to develop E2EE, the platform had to rebuild over 100 features in a client-centric way, Buck said. Last month, Meta had introduced real-time avatar calls for Messenger.

This feature will be helpful when users don't want to show their real faces during video calls and want a third option between camera-off and camera-on. During a company-wide meeting in June, Ahmad Al-Dahle, Meta's vice president of AI, had said that the company would use its image generation model to allow Messenger users make stickers based on text prompts. “With AI-generated stickers, our users can have infinitely more options for self-expression, cultural representations, and even trend relevance,” Al-Dahle said.

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