IF you’re always chatting on Facebook Messenger, make sure your texts are encrypted.
Leaving them unencrypted puts them at greater risk of snooping – and it’s so easy to avoid.
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Facebook has built a way of encrypting chats directly into Messenger.
That means your texts are scrambled in transit, keeping out potential snoopers.
“End-to-end encryption adds extra security and protection to your messages and calls in a conversation so that only you and whoever you’re talking to can see, hear or read them,” said Facebook.
You have to enable encryption on each individual chat.
And once you’ve done that, it will kickstart an ultra-secure method of sending texts.
“When you send a message in an end-to-end encrypted conversation, your device locks the message as it’s sending,” Facebook explained.
“This message can only be unlocked by a device that owns one of the special keys for that conversation.
“The same is true for the content of your video and audio conversations.”
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Facebook added: “No one can read your messages or hear your calls except the people who have these special keys – not even Meta.
“We couldn’t even if we wanted to.”
Of course end-to-end encryption isn’t a watertight way of keeping your messages private.
You or the receiver of an encrypted text could very easily share those messages without someone else.
So always be cautious with what you share online.
What it will do is stop some methods snoopers would use to read your texts.
It means hackers can’t hijack your texts in transit – and Meta can’t hand over your messages to the government or police.
That can be extremely useful if you’re chatting on public WiFi, or using Messenger in a country with significant government surveillance.
How to activate end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger
To encrypt your messages, open your Facebook Messenger app on iPhone or Android.
Then enter a specific chat and go into the settings.
You’ll then see a pop-up list with the option to Start End-To-End Encrypted Chat.
Tap that and it’ll activate encryption for that specific chat on that app.
You can check to see if your conversation is encrypted at any time.
It’s possible to see your unique encryption keys inside Messenger.
And you can check those keys with your other chatters to see if you have matching ones.
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
