Broken Promises: RIP Instagram’s End-to-End Encrypted DMs

Last week, Instagram ended its opt-in, and therefore rarely used, end-to-end encryption feature. Years after publicly promising to provide the privacy protections of end-to-end encryption across its platforms by default, it instead gave up on that technical challenge. Now, we've all lost an option for safer conversations on one of the biggest social media platforms in the world. In an announcement in 2023, Meta bragged about how it had successfully encrypted Messenger, and teased that Instagram was in progress. Even before then, they’d talked about how important encryption was in Messenger and