In our increasing security conscious/ surveillance paranoid world more tech companies are looking at ways of providing “secure” communication. Facebook’s messaging platform Messenger has announced Secret Conversations, a device to device, end-to-end encrypted chat based on the Signal protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems.
Secret Conversations offers users the ability to send an encrypted message to one other person. These messages never get stored on the Facebook servers, however, as a result, they can only be viewed on one device. It’s unclear how Facebook knows which of your devices to send that one message to.
Messages can be set with a self-destruct time ensuring that your communications can be temporary. Secret Conversations is currently in a limited trial and users who do have access need to opt into using them.
At least for the moment more advanced messaging feature such as GIFs, Videos and in-app payments as well as “other popular features” are not available in Secret Conversations.
It’s not surprising to see Messenger adding this type of feature, with service like Telegram – Ausdroid’s messaging platform of choice – already offering this type of functionality and Google soon to offer their cross-platform Allo app with similar “incognito” features.
Do you have access to the Beta? Let us know what you think below.
