Facebook Messenger Getting End-To-End Encrypted Voice And Video Calls: All You Should Know

Facebook has started rolling out end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls for its flagship messaging service, Messenger, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced.

Facebook Messenger Getting End-To-End Encrypted Voice And Video Calls | Getty

New Delhi: In what could be the one of the biggest privacy fixes that Facebook has ever made, the social networking giant has started rolling out end-to-end encrypted voice and video calls for Messenger, company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has announced. Facebook is also rolling out opt-in end-to-end encryption for group chats and group audio and video calls for its flagship messaging service.

End-to-end encryption or E2EE is a security feature that prevents third-parties from snooping on calls and chats. This security feature has been available for text conversations on the company's messaging service since 2016.

"End-to-end encrypted voice and video calls are now rolling out on Messenger, and we're introducing opt-in end-to-end encryption for group chats and group audio and video calls too. I'm proud that we continue to extend encryption across more services," Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page late on Monday.

This comes weeks after Facebook-owned WhatsApp started introducing end-to-end encrypted chat backups for iOS and Android users globally. The update, if opted for, lets a user back up his chat history with end-to-end encryption. This also lets them be accessible only to them and nobody will be able to unlock the backup. This also means neither WhatsApp nor the backup or cloud service provider will be able to access their end-to-end encryption backup.

The feature for WhatsApp will be rolling out in phases for users worldwide on the latest version of the app. Once the feature becomes available, users should open WhatsApp, go to Settings > Chats > Chat Backups > End-to-End Encrypted Backup, and then follow the prompts.

Meanwhile, late last month, Facebook became Meta, with the company rebranding itself to focus on the metaverse. CEO Zuckerberg had said they now want to be known as a metaverse company, and that the existing name could not 'possibly represent everything that we're doing today, let alone in the future'.