According to an announcement from Facebook’s parent company, Meta, the firm will test encrypted communications and secure storage for all end-to-end talks, which will prohibit staff from seeing chat information or sharing it with authorities.
The encrypted messages’ goal, according to Meta, is to enable users to save and back up communications in case they lose their phone or wish to restore message history on a new device.
This means that until you choose to report them to [Meta], [they] will not have access to your communications.
The move to enable users to encrypt communications comes three days after the firm announced it passed up to police authorities discussions between a Nebraska mother and daughter discussing preparation for the adolescent daughter’s in-house abortion.
Despite the probable link between the two occurrences, a Facebook official informed DailyMail.com that the ‘announcement was not tied to the Nebraska case or law enforcement inquiries.’
We’ve been planning this announcement for months and have been giving frequent updates on our efforts toward default end-to-end encryption for personal communications and chats.’
End-to-end encrypted communications were first tested in August 2021.
In June 2022, Nebraska police officers requested data from Meta about Jessica Burgess, 41, and her 17-year-old daughter, Celeste.
The investigation into the mother-daughter pair started in April, two months before the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, when police received information that Jessica had given her daughter abortion drugs.
‘Nothing in the search warrants obtained from local law enforcement indicated abortion,’ Facebook claimed in a statement, while authorities informed the business of a ‘instance of a stillborn infant who was burnt and buried.’
Former federal prosecutor and West Coast Trial Lawyers president Neama Rahmani told DailyMail.com that Meta “often hands over user information that has been sought by US law enforcement” and that the practice is “not uncommon.”
Messages between Jessica and Celeste dated April 20 revealed Jessica instructing her daughter on how to take the abortion pills.
After Celeste’s loss two days later, the couple reportedly burned and buried the fetus.
Both ladies were charged with felony removing, hiding, or leaving a dead human corpse, as well as misdemeanor concealing the death of another person and false reporting.
Jessica was eventually charged with two further felonies: conducting or attempting abortion at more over 20 weeks and performing abortion as a non-licensed doctor.
Celeste was 23 weeks pregnant at the time of her reported stillbirth.
Both ladies have entered not guilty pleas and are awaiting trial.
Meta’s Messenger app has also been updated with the option to unsend messages and the elimination of ‘vanish mode.’
Messenger will soon offer a new mode in which all communications vanish after a certain amount of time.
Messenger conversations are securely stored and may be accessed via a PIN or a created authenticator code, with additional restoration provided by a third-party cloud service.
Storage is presently being tested on both Android and iOS, however it is not yet accessible via the desktop client or unencrypted conversations.