It’s Your Fault Really

Casey Newton, writing in Platformer, reported that Meta is deprecating the end-to-end encryption feature in Messenger's Secret Conversations. The reason given? Not enough people used it. Which means, if you read between the lines, that this is your fault.

This is the oldest trick Meta has. They roll out a privacy feature with minimal fanfare, bury it somewhere three menus deep, and then point to the low adoption numbers as proof that users don't care. The users, of course, never knew it existed. The statement practically wrote itself: we gave you the tools, you didn't use them, so we're taking them back. Thanks for confirming what we wanted to do anyway.

The thing is, Meta has never had a genuine interest in securing your messages. End-to-end encryption is bad for business in the most literal sense. If Meta can't read your conversations, they can't train their models on them, and they can't serve you more precisely targeted ads. A private conversation is an asset they can't monetise, and that's the full story. The feature was always going to go. The only question was how they'd frame the exit, and they've found a clean enough answer in low usage.

I've written about this pattern before in the context of Instagram. None of this is accidental. The choices Meta makes about what features to surface, what to bury, and what to remove are all downstream of the same set of incentives. Your privacy sits at the very bottom of that list. The algorithm, the feed, the suggested content, and now the removal of encrypted messaging are all pieces of the same puzzle.

What makes this particularly grim is that encrypted messaging is not some niche technical preference. It's the baseline of what a messaging service should offer. Signal and iMessage have demonstrated that you can build end-to-end encryption at scale without it being some obscure opt-in feature that users have to go hunting for. Meta made a choice to treat it as exactly that, and now they're making another choice to remove it and dress it up as a response to user behaviour.

It fits the broader pattern of what Meta is becoming. AI slop in your feed, fake engagement bots, insecure messaging. The direction of travel is obvious. None of these things are surprises or mistakes. They are deliberate decisions made by a company that has decided the path forward is to extract as much attention and data as possible, and anything that gets in the way of that, including basic privacy protections, gets quietly deprecated because apparently not enough of you were using it.