Facebook’s data mining habits have been in the news for the past few weeks and today they’ve admitted that they’re reading your private messages in FB Messenger. They use some of this information to better your experience, they scan images and text to be sure you’re not breaking any of their policies and to check in on reported users. They also, however, scan your messages to receive more data about you. Advertising has been in messenger for a while and your private conversations are being used to customize that info for marketers.
Check Out: How to download your Facebook Data…
Facebook messenger has had a way for you to encrypt (or hide info in) your messages for a while, the above video is a walkthrough on how to turn those settings on. Unfortunately, you have to opt-in per conversation but once it’s on your messages are encrypted “end to end” meaning they can’t be read by Facebook’s AI and should they be intercepted by a third party, they would come through as gibberish-like code instead of the messages you’ve sent.
Here is a step by step guide for turning on “secret conversations” in messenger.
- Select the conversation you’d like to make secret.
- Tap the name of the group or contact above your conversation thread.
- Scroll down and select “Secret Conversation.”
- That’s it…you’re encrypted.