Meta has reaffirmed its commitment to rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) in Messenger for individual and group chats.

Meta has previously committed to rolling out E2EE, despite push back from some jurisdictions eager to see a backdoor implemented in secure communication platforms. The company has now authored a blog post reaffirming that E2EE will be fully rolled out by the end of 2023.

Starting today, millions more people’s chats on Messenger will be upgraded to stronger encryption standards as part of our ongoing end-to-end encryption (E2EE) testing. We remain on track to launch default E2EE for one-to-one friends and family chats on Messenger by the end of the year. And as we increase the scale of testing, we wanted to provide an update on how we’ve approached this large and complex engineering challenge.

The company says it had to completely rework many features, since implementing E2EE required rethinking the traditional server-based paradigm its messaging services previously used.

As we’ve developed E2EE, we have had to rebuild over 100 features in this client-centric way. Messenger is one of the richest chat experiences available. We know that people want encryption, but they also want the same fun and ability to express themselves they’ve come to expect on Messenger.

One example of how we rebuilt Messenger is when people share external links like Youtube videos. We know people want to see rich previews, so they have some idea what the links shared by their friends are before they click on them. In the old model, the server would go and retrieve that information from Youtube, and show you an image of the video as a preview. That’s why it sometimes takes a brief second to load. In an E2EE chat, however, the app on your phone will go to Youtube. It will get the rich preview for you, and when you hit send, your app encrypts the whole package and sends it to the recipient.

Meta’s announcement is good news for Messenger users, giving them more privacy and security in their communications.