After the announcement of Facebook’s vision about its future in March, the company seems to start testing the encryption of video and audio calls over Messenger in Secret mode. This means that Facebook aims to encrypt Messenger calls in a limited way, as an option but available for everybody.
End-to-end encryption for calls
Facebook who often becomes the target of criticism about privacy, the company has started taking some steps for being more secure and more acting more respectful to users’ privacy. In the current situation, messaging and calling app of Facebook “Facebook Messenger” only encrypts text messages. The first step that is going to be taken is end-to-end encryption for “secret” Messenger calls.
According to app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is working on encrypting video and audio calls but only in secret conversation mode. So, it is important to note that the calls and audio messages will not be encrypted in normal mode.
Facebook updated its privacy policy
As a competitor to Facebook Messenger (which happens to be owned by Facebook) WhatsApp provides end-to-end encryption for ordinary text messages as well as audio and video calls by default. For catching up to the standard set by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger should be encrypting all messages including calls. Only with this Facebook Messenger can compete for the privacy standards of other contemporary means of secure communication.
At the beginning of this year, Facebook was found to be paying people up to $20 a month in exchange for gaining comprehensive access into their phones. For this task, the company announced a market research app named Study. The app works by invitation through ads to collect participants. The aim of the app is to show users what kind of data Facebook will collect from them and what does it do with that. On the privacy side, Facebook also updated its face-recognition settings, providing means to augment users’ control over it.
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