Messaging apps retreat from privacy protections
Messaging apps retreat from privacy protections
Publish Date: 2026-06-01 07:13:00
Source Domain: e.vnexpress.net
In May, U.S. company Meta removed end-to-end encryption on Instagram, citing a “too low activation rate.
It had introduced E2EE as an opt-in feature in 2021, requiring users to dig deep into settings to enable it.
In March, a TikTok spokesperson in the U.S. told U.K. state broadcaster BBC there were no plans to implement E2EE in its direct messaging feature.
Meta’s other platform, WhatsApp, is entangled in privacy-related litigation in the U.S., with plaintiffs from countries including Australia, Brazil, and India.
According to Russian news outlet RT, the company is accused of allowing employees and third parties to access users’ private messages in breach of its original security commitments.
In the wake of the WhatsApp controversy, X owner Elon Musk and Telegram founder Pavel Durov both declared that WhatsApp’s security promises amount to “the lie of the century.”
Durov wrote on X: “Only an idiot would trust WhatsApp in 2026. When analyzing how WhatsApp implements encryption, we found multiple vulnerabilities that could be exploited.
By removing E2EE, apps like Instagram revert to standard transport encryption (such as TLS/HTTPS), meaning messages passing through Meta’s servers exist in plaintext that their systems can read.
If a message is the equivalent of a letter, the absence of E2EE means it is sent without being sealed in an envelope.
Postal workers (the messaging servers) or anyone else can read the contents.
Even more worryingly, the letter carriers (the messaging service providers) can log everything about a user’s preferences, habits, and interests, and sell that data to advertising companies or use it to train AI.
About-face by major tech companies
According to British newspaper The Guardian, at Facebook’s annual F8 developer conference in the United States in April 2019, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared: “The future is private.”
He committed at the time to restructuring the entire infrastructure and merging the messaging systems of WhatsApp, Messenger, and…
