The boss of the social network, Elon Musk, announced on Sunday March 5 that he wanted to deploy the encryption of private messages “during the month”.
Thing promised, thing due? Private messages on Twitter should very soon be encrypted, announced his boss Elon Musk on the social network.
“The goal is to roll out the ability to reply to private messages, use any reaction emoji and offer encryption later this month,” Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday March 5.
Encryption, a promise of Elon Musk
The billionaire, who officially bought the social network last October for 44 billion dollars, had already broached the subject in April 2022 when takeover negotiations were underway.
“Twitter’s private messages should be end-to-end encrypted like on Signal, so no one can spy on or hack into your messages,” he tweeted.
The post had been liked by more than 1.4 million users.
Securing exchanges
End-to-end encryption secures digital exchanges. Applied to all types of messages (written, audio, video, etc.), this technology guarantees that only the people sending and receiving the exchanges can access their content. This is made possible by a secret encryption key that scrambles the content for everyone else.
Elon Musk had remained silent on the subject since taking over as Twitter’s head. During a meeting held on November 22, 2022 at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, the boss reiterated his wish. He asked teams to work on end-to-end encryption for private messages, but also for video and voice calls, according to a recording of the meeting seen by The Verge.
“We want to allow users to communicate without worrying about their privacy, [ou] without worrying about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their private messages to go viral on the internet or thinking that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their conversations,” Elon Musk said.
He then said he spoke with Moxie Marlinspike, founder of the Signal instant messaging application – renowned for its encryption – and former Twitter employee. The latter was “potentially ready to lend a hand” to deploy encryption within the company, Elon Musk said during this meeting.
The social network has already experienced several setbacks on the subject. In 2018, an API bug (for application programming interface or interface application programming) had accidentally sent trades to other accounts, for whom they were not intended.