Stanford University

Meta Just Happens to Expand Messenger’s End-to-End Encryption

Meta Just Happens to Expand Messenger’s End-to-End Encryption

Riana Pfefferkorn of SIO spoke with Wired on Meta's expansion of end-to-end encryption in Messenger.
image of three phones illustrating how end to end encryption works on Meta's platform Meta

A NEBRASKA WOMAN and her 17-year-old daughter are facing felony and misdemeanor charges related to allegedly performing an abortion after 20 weeks, which has long been illegal in the state, and concealing a fetus. Reports from the Lincoln Journal Star and Motherboard revealed this week that law enforcement collected evidence for the charges in part by soliciting data from Meta with a warrant that ordered the company to hand over records from the 17-year-old’s Messenger chat histories. While Meta was complying with a lawful court order, the company would not have been able to produce the chats had the participants been using end-to-end encryption, a feature Meta has long promised to turn on for all users by default.

Meanwhile, in a move that Meta says is totally unrelated, the social media giant announced this morning that it is testing expansions of end-to-end encrypted messaging on Messenger.

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Riana Pfefferkorn
News

Q&A with Riana Pfefferkorn, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar

Riana Pfefferkorn joined the Stanford Internet Observatory as a research scholar in December. She comes from Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society, where she was the Associate Director of Surveillance and Cybersecurity.
cover link Q&A with Riana Pfefferkorn, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar
image of cursor hovering over an image of a lock
Blogs

Why Encryption and Online Safety Go Hand-in-Hand

Riana Pfefferkorn is a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory and a member of the Global Encryption Coalition. This first appeared in Brookings TECH STREAM.
cover link Why Encryption and Online Safety Go Hand-in-Hand
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