Good news, privacy enthusiasts: Facebook’s one-on-one encrypted messaging feature called Secret Conversations is now live for all Android and iOS users.
Secret Conversations allows Messenger users to send end-to-end encrypted messages to their Facebook friends. There are a few caveats, however. First, it only works on a single device.
Facebook says it doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to distribute encryption keys across your phone, tablet, and PCs.
You also have to explicitly start a Secret Conversation in Messenger. Encryption isn’t the default mode, and encrypted messages are not integrated into the primary thread of your conversations with a given contact.
In other words, if Alice and Bob have been chatting for years on Messenger, they’ll have to start a separate encrypted thread, and that encrypted thread will never integrate with their original, unencrypted thread.
That approach is very unlike what Facebook-owned WhatsApp is doing. The popular messaging platform automatically encrypts messages for all users if they have an encryption-compatible version of WhatsApp on their phone.
The final caveat for Facebook Messenger is that encrypted messaging only works in one-to-one messaging.
Group conversations are not included in Secret Conversations.
Now that we’ve got the preamble out of the way, here’s how to use Secret Conversations.
For our example, we’re using Messenger for Android but Messenger on iOS works similarly.
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