It seems that users will have to wait at least one more year for the added safety of Meta's enhanced encryption features.
The company said that the delay for message encryption on Facebook and Instagram would be in the year 2023. The global head of safety for Meta, Antigone Davis, wrote an opinion piece for The Telegraph on Saturday revealing the delay along with the 2023 timetable.
"We know people expect us to use the most secure technology available which is why we are working to make it the default across the rest of our apps," Davis wrote.
The problem is getting a feature right that offers users protection and privacy while also discouraging illegal or harmful behavior on the platform. There is an ongoing debate about how tech companies can continue to fight abuse and support law enforcement if they can't access your messages. She said that Meta is gathering insights from privacy and safety experts, civil society and governments to make sure it gets things right.
Davis lays out what she describes as Meta's "three-pronged approach" to ensuring user safety on its various platforms, but no mention of end-to-end message encryption is made. She goes back to that topic at the end of the post, talking about the tension between users' desire for absolute privacy and the company's need to protect users when behavior crosses legal lines.
"As we roll out end-to-end encryption we will use a combination of non-encrypted data across our apps, account information and reports from users to keep them safe in a privacy-protected way while assisting public safety efforts," Davis wrote. This is the same basic strategy the company uses with the messaging service.
The feature's roll out on Facebook and Instagram will be delayed until at least in 2023. There are plenty of reasons to question Meta's motives with a post like this, given the company's track record.
A Washington Post story on Sunday had a headline "Facebook's race-blind policies around hate speech came at the expense of Black users", which was the latest in an ongoing series of damning deep dives behind the scenes of Facebook operations. The paper reported earlier that some Facebook executives pushed back on a suggested "aggressive overhaul" of Facebook's software that would prioritize scrubbing posts directed at minority groups before other users could see them.
The specifics of the report are not clear in terms of what's new and what's been in the news before. Meta's ongoing PR nightmare has been made worse by the fact that Facebook's "race-blind" approach to hate speech negatively impacted Black users.
Meta knew this story was coming ahead of time if the Washington Post reporters did their due diligence and sought comment from the source. Is it a coincidence that Davis's Telegraph post was published 12 hours before the WaPo report? It's definitely possible. There is a chance that it was a move designed to shift what kind of conversations people would have about Facebook and Meta on Sunday.
Wild speculation is what makes imputing any kind of ulterior intent into the reveal of Meta's end-to-end encryption delay so strange. We're at that company now. Facebook has been less than honest with the public many times. That can happen many times before we have to question the motivation behind a decision. End-to-end encryption is delayed. You should read the Washington Post story and get a better understanding of how user safety may not always come first at Meta.
