Facebook has been working hard to improve its public image for a few years now. Well, one major step for Facebook in the process of garnering user trust would be to enable encryption of messages between the users without changing any settings. However, new information suggests that Facebook Messenger and Instagram chats may not receive the encryption feature by default until 2022 at least.

Now Facebook did roll out end-to-end encryption on Messenger way back in 2016. But this feature is only available when a user switched the conversation to 'Secret Conversation' mode. Instagram, meanwhile, still does not have the feature. Facebook talked about how they are going to be rolling out the feature to Messenger, WhatsApp. In addition to that, Facebook also plans on allowing cross-platform chat between all the platforms.

Facebook took to their blog and posted a few studies and interviews about privacy. However, they were not explicit about what they are planning to do.

Here's an excerpt of what Facebook had to say:
While we expect to make more progress on default end-to-end encryption for Messenger and Instagram Direct this year, it’s a long-term project and we won’t be fully end-to-end encrypted until sometime in 2022 at the earliest. Moreover, the safety features we’ve already introduced are designed to work with end-to-end encryption, and we plan to continue building strong safety features into our services.

Given end-to-end encryption has been around for so long, its a little surprising that it has taken Facebook this long to make a move, especially since WhatsApp - a company Facebook owns, has had the feature for so long. Hopefully, both Instagram and Messenger do get encryption soon though.