Although it doesn’t usually come up among first names in the conversation about instant messaging services, the truth is that Facebook Messenger is the third most used IM service in the world today, only behind WhatsApp, which holds the first position since the arrival of this type of application/service, and Weixin/WeChat, widely used in China. The first and third most used services in the world, according to Statista data, with a total number of almost 3000 million users in the world belong to Meta (formerly Facebook).
This can be explained by years of experience with the Facebook messaging service in terms of integration from its origins into the social network interface. However, despite its large share of users and encouraging them to repeatedly access the social network, for some time now it seems that Meta has focused on WhatsApp and left Facebook Messenger somewhat aside. Although sometimes they remember the “poor brother” again.
And luckily for its users, this is one of those opportunities because, as we can read in The Verge, Meta has finally started testing end-to-end encryption by default on Facebook Messenger. And the thing is that today this function is already available, but it is optional, and experience shows that many users, either out of ignorance or lack of interest, never use it.
With end-to-end encryption and provided that custody of private keys rests solely with their owners (not with third parties), communication privacy is guaranteed, because even if the network traffic is captured and analyzed, without these keys it will not be possible to discover the content of the conversation. There’s no specific date yet, but Facebook says full deployment of encryption by default in Facebook Messenger will be completed within the next year.
