After Friday, Meta can read your Instagram DMs again
This Friday, May 8, Meta will turn off end-to-end encryption for Instagram DMs. The feature, added as opt-in in 2023, is being yanked because almost nobody used it — or at least, that's the official explanation, according to MacRumors, citing a Meta spokesperson who told The Guardian: "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months. Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp."
Once the encryption is gone, Meta can read what people send each other on Instagram. That opens the door to feeding message contents into advertising algorithms or training material for the company's chatbots. It also makes life easier for the police and the child-safety lobby, both of whom have spent years pressuring Meta to ditch encryption so investigators can subpoena chat logs.
Meta tipped its hand back in March, slipping the news onto a help page. People with encrypted threads will get a prompt in Instagram that tells them how to save anything they want to keep. Why those archives have to come down before Friday, and what becomes of them after, Meta hasn't bothered to say.
In 2019, Mark Zuckerberg spent the year publicly evangelizing for stronger encryption across Meta's apps.
