Meta announced today that they will make Messenger more secure by adding a special lock to protect messages. This means that only the people who send and receive the messages will be able to read them. They are also going to let more people try out this new feature to make sure it works well for everyone. The company has been adding special protection to keep messages safe in Messenger for a long time. 

At first, only some people could use it, but now more and more people can. They started with protecting messages that are like secret conversations in 2016. Then, they added protection for voice and video calls in 2021. In January 2022, they made it possible to protect group chats and calls too. And in August 2022, they started testing protection for private chats between just two people. 

Meta is a company that lets people send messages to each other. Some people want Meta to make it so that nobody can read those messages except for the people sending them. This is because there was a situation where Meta gave someone's messages to the police, and that person got in trouble. This happened after a law about abortion changed. So now, people think it's really important to keep their messages private. 

Meta, the company that owns Instagram, is planning to add a special security feature called end-to-end encryption to direct messages on Instagram. This means that only the people who are sending and receiving the messages will be able to read them, and nobody else. However, the company is taking longer than expected to test this feature because they are facing some technical difficulties. The company had a hard time adding safety features to Messenger because they had to change the way things worked and create a new way for people to keep their messages private. 

They added a special code to make sure only the right people could see their messages. Meta said that they had to fix over 100 things in the Messenger app to make it work with end-to-end encryption. This is something that WhatsApp, another app owned by Meta, has been doing for a while. They are using what they learned from WhatsApp to make Messenger safer. 

After something bad happened, a lot of groups wrote a letter to Meta and other places asking them to make private chats safer by using special technology. People in charge from different countries are thinking about making new rules that could make it easier for them to see what people are saying in messaging apps. 

Meta, which owns WhatsApp does not like these rules and is trying to make sure that messages in WhatsApp stay private. But they have not made sure that messages in Messenger and Instagram are private yet.