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Instagram quietly drops end-to-end encrypted chats (proton.me)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Instagram appears to be stepping back from end-to-end encrypted messaging — a surprising move after years of Meta, its parent company, promoting strong encryption as the future of private communication.

A notice on Instagram’s help pages now says end-to-end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026. The page instructs affected users to download any chat messages or shared media they want to keep before that date.

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[–] 6 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Does anyone know if they're unencrypting chats that already happened? Like my chat history? If so that's fucked up

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago

    They could always do that, and basically anything you can read on your phone, they can access if they need.

    Encryption is a math thing: generate a pair of keys: one te encde, one to decode. I broadcast the one to encode ("public key"), and the whole world is tu use it to send me encrypted messages. I keep the decoding ("private key") only for myself.

    In client to erver encryption, we exchange keys with the server through which go all the comms: it decodes my messages and re-encodes them for my contact.
    In e2e, the key exchange is between contacts: the server does not have the private keys.
    In Meta, the proprietary app can send your private key to the server and then they know what you wrote. You have no way to know it doesn't do so!

    Opensource audited software is the only way to make sure.

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  • [–] 4 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    If they can, then it was never e2e encrypted.

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  • [–] 7 points 6 months ago

    Well e2e encryption is never private for the entity contrilling the endpoint. Instagram could push an update which decrypts and uploads your past chat history. Of course they’d only do it for your benefit so you don’t lose any data /s

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