Facebook Adds End-to-End Encryption for Audio and Video Calls in Messenger

Facebook on Friday said it’s extending end-to-end encryption
(E2EE) for voice and video calls in Messenger, along with testing a
new opt-in setting that will turn on end-to-end encryption for
Instagram DMs.

“The content of your messages and calls in an end-to-end
encrypted conversation is protected from the moment it leaves your
device to the moment it reaches the receiver’s device,” Messenger’s
Ruth Kricheli said^[1]
in a post. “This means that nobody else, including Facebook, can
see or listen to what’s sent or said. Keep in mind, you can report
an end-to-end encrypted message to us if something’s wrong.”

The social media behemoth said E2EE is becoming the industry
standard for improved privacy and security.

It’s worth noting that the company’s flagship messaging service
gained support for E2EE in
text chats^[2] in 2016, when it added a
“secret
conversation^[3]” option to its app,
while communications on its sister platform WhatsApp became fully
encrypted the same year following the integration of Signal
Protocol into the application.

In addition, the company is also expected to kick off a limited
test in certain countries that lets users opt-in to end-to-end
encrypted messages and calls for one-on-one conversations on
Instagram.

The moves are part of Facebook’s pivot to a privacy-focused
communications platform the company announced in March 2019, with
CEO Mark Zuckerberg stating that the “future of communication will
increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can
be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their
messages and content won’t stick around forever.”

The changes have since set off concerns that full encryption
could create digital hiding places for perpetrators, what with
Facebook accounting^[4]
for over 90% of the illicit and child sexual abuse material (CSAM)
flagged by tech companies, while also posing a significant
challenge when it comes to balancing the need for preventing its
platforms from being used for criminal or abusive activities while
also upholding privacy.

The development also comes a week after Apple announced^[5]
plans to scan users’ photo libraries for CSAM content as part of a
sweeping child safety initiative that has been subject to ample pushback^[6]
from users, security researchers, the Electronic Frontier
Foundation (EFF), and even Apple employees^[7], prompting concerns that
the proposals could be ripe for further abuse or create new risks,
and that “even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and
the narrowly-scoped backdoor is still a backdoor.”

The iPhone maker, however, has defended its system^[8], adding it intends to
incorporate further protections to safeguard the technology from
being taken advantage of by governments or other third parties with
“multiple levels of auditability,” or reject any government demands
to repurpose the technology for surveillance purposes.

“If and only if you meet a threshold of something on the order
of 30 known child pornographic images matching, only then does
Apple know anything about your account and know anything about
those images, and at that point, only knows about those images, not
about any of your other images,” Apple’s senior vice president of
software engineering, Craig Federighi, said^[9]
in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

“This isn’t doing some analysis for did you have a picture of
your child in the bathtub? Or, for that matter, did you have a
picture of some pornography of any other sort? This is literally
only matching on the exact fingerprints of specific known child
pornographic images,” Federighi explained.