Facebook’s Messenger and Instagram doesn’t plan to roll out end-to-end encryption by default until 2023. This was first reported by The Guardian. The company merged Messenger and Instagram chats last year, as a part of its plan to create a unified messaging system across all of its platforms. And while messages sent through Messenger and Instagram can be E2EE, that option isn’t turned on by default — and likely won’t be — until sometime in 2023. WhatsApp already supports E2EE by default.

In a post in The Telegraph, Antigone Davis, Meta’s head of safety, attributes the delay to concerns about user safety. Since E2EE means only the sender and recipient will see their conversations, Davis says Meta wants to ensure that this doesn’t interfere with the platform’s ability to help stop criminal activity. Once E2EE does become available by default, Davis notes that the company will “use a combination of non-encrypted data across our apps, account information and reports from users” to help keep them safe, all while “assisting public safety efforts.”

In a blog post earlier this year, Meta said that default E2EE would become available on Instagram and Messenger “sometime in 2022 at the earliest.” But now, Davis says that Meta wants to “get this right,” so the company plans on delaying the feature’s debut until 2023.

Meta already uses end-to-end encryption on its WhatsApp messaging service and had been planning to extend that to its Messenger and Instagram apps in 2022. It has already encrypted voice and video calls on Messenger. Announcing the privacy drive in 2019, Zuckerberg, said: “People expect their private communications to be secure and to only be seen by the people they’ve sent them to – not hackers, criminals, over-reaching governments or even the people operating the services they’re using.” Meta’s apps are used by 2.8 billion people every day.