App Researcher Jane Manchun Wong, yesterday uncovered Twitter’s plans to bring back end-to-end encryption to its Direct Messaging system.
She made this known in a tweet, which the company’s new CEO, Elon Musk confirmed, not explicitly but only posted a winky eye emoji in response.
Although the CEO has lately expressed interest in making direct messages on the platform more private, Twitter has since abandoned its earlier attempts in this area after testing an encrypted “secret conversations” feature in 2018.
If Twitter had introduced the encrypted direct messages feature, it would have been able to compete more effectively against other secure messaging networks, such as Signal and WhatsApp.
However, work on the project came to a halt, and Twitter never commented on the reason why, nor did it explain why it had never remarked on the prototype that Wong discovered being built in the app years ago.
Wong has now claimed to have seen Twitter’s code that references encryption keys and end-to-end encrypted chats, which she tweeted out as evidence.
In another screenshot, there is a “Conversation key.” The app explains that this is a number that is made up of the encryption keys from the conversation. “If it matches the number in the recipient’s phone, end-to-end encryption is guaranteed,” the message reads.
Musk has also stated that the relaunch of Twitter’s $8 monthly subscription plan will take place later than expected. To “make sure that it is rock solid,” Musk tweeted late Tuesday, Twitter Blue Verified would come back on November 29, and that users will soon be able to write longer tweets.
