Security is one of those things where if you have it, the world can seem a lot safer. It doesn’t necessarily mean it is — there are a lot of factors to keeping everything secure online — but every bit helps.
Security on your phone can stop yourself falling victim to scams, and security on your computer to deal with software that could potentially break things.
In messaging, the security there to protect what goes on in the communications between two or more people is encryption, and it’s one of those things that can be made all the better by securing at the starting point — the person starting the message — and the end point — the person ending it. It’s a type of communication that can help make messaging feel more secure, and comes with a clear name to help cement it as such: end-to-end encryption.
Simply put, it’s a type of communication where both points of the message are encrypted, and can’t be intercepted in between. Standard encryption doesn’t necessarily work like that, and may be intercepted at a point. It might not be obviously or immediately decoded, but it can be, meaning communication isn’t exactly secure.
It’s no wonder then that end-to-end is largely seen as the gold standard of messaging standards, and one that lots of services support.
Apple Messages supports it if you have an iPhone or iPad, as does Signal, WhatsApp, and even Facebook Messenger.
Those last two are apps by Meta, which makes this week’s change rather surprising, because Instagram has switched off end-to-end encryption for messages used in its app and social network.
Simply put, from May 8 onwards (a few days ago), Instagram users no longer have access to the gold standard of message encryption, and the reasons aren’t exactly clear.
There’s no news release about it from Meta, even though almost everything else gets a mention of some sort, and Meta isn’t really saying much.
For proponents of the decision, it means people conducting illegal and aggressive messaging targeting younger individuals may end up pulling away from the platform, though the social media age assurance ban should theoretically limit some of that access in the first place.
But for everyone else, the changes to the removal of end-to-end encryption means less security for their direct messaging. It technically means that if Meta wants to peek in on your direct messages to friends on the social network, it technically can.
While that doesn’t necessarily mean it will, it does suggest Meta and Instagram could be doing this for reasons related to advertising. A social network based entirely on images and videos needs to get its advertising signals from somewhere, and taking encryption out of messages could easily grant that.
It’s also possible that Meta is using the change to train its AI platform, though this seems less likely.
Interestingly, Meta will still have end-to-end encryption messaging on WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, but both are proper messaging platforms, compared to Instagram being a social network with direct messaging added to the system. That could be why the feature is sticking around on the other two, while Insta sees it removed.
Whatever the reason, it suggests that if you want to have properly private conversations, Instagram is no longer the place for it.
