Since 2016, the social behemoth now known as Meta has been working to deploy end-to-end encryption in its communication apps. CEO Mark Zuckerberg even promised in 2019 that the data privacy protection would roll out by default across all of the company’s chat apps. In practice, though, it was a wildly ambitious goal fraught with technical and political challenges, and Meta has only been able to move toward it in gradual, incremental steps. But this week the company is finally starting its full rollout.

“It’s been a wild ride,” says Jon Millican, a software engineer within Meta’s messenger privacy team. “I suspect this is the first time that something’s been end-to-end encrypted with all of the constraints that we’re working with. It’s not just that we’re migrating people’s data, but it’s actually that we’re having to fundamentally change a bunch of the assumptions that they work with when they’re using the product.”

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