Facebook has delayed plans to encrypt users’ private messages after warnings from campaigners that the changes will make it harder to catch child abuse.
Antigone Davis, the technology company’s head of safety, said the controversial changes would now not happen until 2023 at the earliest.
Facebook had previously said it was planning to encrypt messages in its Messenger and Instagram apps at some point next year, but said it was extending the deadline to give it time to introduce other features that could catch criminals.
Writing in the Sunday Telegraph, Ms Davis wrote: “We’re taking our time to get this right and we don’t plan to finish the global rollout of end-to-end encryption by default across all our messaging services until sometime in 2023.”
However, she defended the company’s plans to encrypt messages, saying it would be possible to detect abuse and report it to police while guaranteeing people’s privacy.
Facebook, which recently changed the company’s name to Meta, announced plans for end-to-end encryption to be turned on by default in its messaging apps in 2019.
The technology, which is already used in the company’s WhatsApp service, scrambles the contents of messages in transit so that only the sender and recipient can read them.
Facebook’s plans have been criticised by law enforcement authorities and child safety advocates who say the changes will make it easier for terrorists and paedophiles to use its services without danger of being intercepted.
Ministers have said that while they support strong encryption, fully implementing end-to-end encryption would make it impossible for police to access criminals’ communications.
Priti Patel, the home secretary, has called Facebook’s plans “morally wrong and dangerous”. The Home Office has enlisted the advertising agency M&C Saatchi for a £534,000 TV, radio and newspaper advertising campaign accusing the company of “blindfolding police”.
The company’s plans have raised concerns because Facebook reports more cases of child abuse imagery than any other service, passing thousands of cases a year to police that will be harder to detect with end-to-end encryption.
Last year, it accounted for more than 90pc of the 21.5m child abuse reports sent to the US National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children.
Ms Davis said Facebook would continue to be able to report criminal activity despite messages being encrypted by using alternative detection systems, and that the company was consulting safety experts and governments ahead of the change.
For example, it will monitor for “patterns” that might be a sign of strangers attempting to contact children, such as people setting up multiple accounts and sending messages to a large number of people they are not friends with.
The company is also encouraging users to report illegal or harmful messages. Ms Davis said that WhatsApp, which has been end-to-end encrypted since 2016, is still able to detect the behaviour and alert child safety authorities.
She said that Facebook had conducted a review of historic cases that had been reported to law enforcement and determined that it would still be able to provide “critical information” even with end-to-end encryption activated.
“We believe people shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and safety,” Ms Davis wrote.
Facebook is planning to make its three messaging services – Messenger, Instagram’s direct messages and WhatsApp – interoperable so that users can communicate between them.
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