Broken Promises: RIP Instagram’s End-to-End Encrypted DMs
This article is sourced and framed entirely from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights advocacy organization, centering activist perspective on corporate privacy promises. The language employs charged framing ('Broken Promises,' 'gave up,' 'reversal,' 'disheartening,' 'abandoning') and presents Meta's decision as a moral failure rather than a business or technical trade-off, with no counterargument from Meta beyond a single brief quoted statement. The article advocates for specific regulatory/design interventions (opt-in vs.
Primary voices: NGO or civil society, corporate or institutional spokesperson
- This article does not address Meta's stated technical, safety, or operational challenges in implementing end-to-end encryption at scale across its platforms.
- This article does not address law enforcement or child safety concerns that may have influenced Meta's decision.
- This article does not include perspectives from Meta engineers, product leaders, or fuller context from Meta's public statements beyond the brief quoted claim.
As Meta faces ongoing regulatory pressure around encryption and child safety (particularly in the EU and US), framing of this decision may shift if legal or technical challenges emerge.
Activist-sourcedAdvocacy toneAnti-interventionist
Last week, Instagram ended its opt-in, and therefore rarely used, end-to-end encryption feature. Years after publicly promising to provide the privacy protections of end-to-end encryption across its platforms by default, it instead gave up on that technical challenge. Now, we've all lost an option for safer conversations on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world.
In an announcement in 2023, Meta bragged about how it had successfully encrypted Messenger, and teased that Instagram was in progress. Even before then, they’d talked about how important encryption was in Messenger and Instagram in a white paper published in 2022, stating:
We want people to have a trusted private space that’s safe and secure, which is why we’re taking our time to thoughtfully build and implement e2ee by default across Messenger and Instagram DMs.
So where did the reversal come from? In a statement, Meta claimed that, “Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs.” This isn’t all that surprising, as turning it on was an optional four-step process that few people knew about. Defaults matter, and Meta’s choice to blame people for failing to opt into this feature is proof of how much. In that same statement, the company pointed people to WhatsApp for access to encrypted messaging. Yet if Meta truly wanted people to have a trusted private space to communicate, it would meet them everywhere they are: on WhatsApp, on Messenger, and on Instagram.
But at least Meta was straightforward about the fact that it will not continue to support or work on this feature. That's rare. Most tech company promises aren’t broken explicitly, they just remain undelivered long enough to be forgotten.
This is particularly disappointing as other companies take even bigger swings, like Google and Apple working together to implement end-to-end encryption over Rich Communication Services (RCS), and Signal’s continued work to make its app simpler and easier to use for everyone.
Meta abandoning this principle is disheartening, especially as we are still waiting for other promised features from the company, like end-to-end encryption in Facebook Messenger group messages. Instead of blaming users for not using these sorts of features and then abandoning the promise of delivery, Meta—and other tech companies—should start by enabling strong privacy protective features by default.
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