At the weekend Facebook announced that it was updating Messenger so that it was more secure, at least from an encryption standpoint.

While Facebook Messenger text messages have been secured with end-to-end (E2E) encryption since 2016, its audio and video calling hasn’t been.

“In the past year, we’ve seen a surge in the use of audio and video calling with more than 150 million video calls a day on Messenger. Now we’re introducing calling to this chat mode so you can secure your audio and video calls with this same technology, if you choose,” writes Facebook.

The social network rightly points out that E2E encryption has become something of a standard and points out that it’s used in the likes of WhatsApp. To be fair, most good instant messaging or calling applications use E2E encryption.

Facebook goes on to say that it will begin testing this sort of encryption for group chats and group video calls in Messenger.

“We’ll also begin a test for your delivery controls to work with your end-to-end encrypted chats. That way, you can prevent unwanted interactions by deciding who can reach your chats list, who goes to your requests folder, and who can’t message you at all,” the social network said.

In addition, Instagram DMs will also likely be getting E2E encryption although this is still in the testing phase so it will likely be a few months before we hear more on that front.

Finally, as part of the update to Messenger, Facebook has also tweaked the Disappearing Messages feature.

“We’ve updated this setting to provide more options for people in the chat to choose the amount of time before all new messages disappear, from as few as 5 seconds to as long as 24 hours,” the firm concluded.

[Source – Facebook]