Meta has begun its rollout of automatic encryption of all Facebook and Messenger chats, the company has announced.
Messages and calls protected by end-to-end-encryption (E2EE), which has been an option since 2016, can be read only by the sender and recipient.
Under the changes, Meta will no longer have access to the contents of what users send or receive, unless one user in a chat chooses to report a message to the company.
The new features will be available immediately, but the company said it would take some time for end-to-end encryption to be rolled out to the more than one billion users on the platform.
Users will receive a prompt to set up a recovery method to restore their messages once the transition is completed.
Apps including iMessage, Signal and WhatsApp all already protect the privacy of messages with E2EE.
Meta said it had worked with outside experts, academics, advocates and governments to identify risks to “ensure that privacy and safety go hand-in-hand”.
It said: “When E2EE is default, we will also use a variety of tools, including artificial intelligence, subject to applicable law, to proactively detect accounts engaged in malicious patterns of behaviour instead of scanning private messages.”
The firm also announced that it would add a number of new features, including the ability to edit messages for up to 15 minutes after they have been sent.
It will also give users the ability to control if people who send messages receive “read receipts” telling them a message has been read.
