Looking to the amount of enormous leaks taking place in the past, today it has turned out to be the need-of-the-hour to properly secure your digital communication with encryption for secured communication. Here is a good news for all the Facebook Messenger users, specially seeking privacy for their chat texts! The social networking giant has recently rolled out a new feature called as “Secret Conversations” offering one-to-one message encryption. This feature is currently made available of iOS and Android platforms, but comes with a few catches.
First is it is device dependent and would work only on a single device at a time. This means you cannot have encryptions keys distributed across your other smart devices like tablets or PCs.
Secondly, this is not available as a default options but you need to navigate to your profile settings and enable it. Unlike WhatsApp, the new encrypted message will never integrate with the primary unencrypted ones.
Thirdly, this feature of Secret Conversations could be used only for one-to-one messaging threads. This means you won’t be allowed to enable this feature for group conversations.
So under the Secret Conversations feature, you will be able to put the existing as well as new conversations for chat encryption, put self-destruct timers for clearing messages periodically and even remove the chat entirely at once. So let us understand this:
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How to Encrypt your Facebook messages with Secret Conversations
First things First! Select the device from where you use the Facebook Messenger App and update it to its latest version. To start with open the Messenger App and click on the profile icon which in the “Me” icon in our case.
On the new screen, scroll down until you see the Secret Conversations entry in the Settings. You can see the Black Lock icon besides it.
Make sure the Secret Conversations is turned ON.
This Secret Conversations can be implemented in two way : One for the existing conversations and other by starting up with new conversations.
i. Encrypting messages of existing conversations by using of Secret Conversations
This is a more likely scenario where people you chat with the most, you want their messages to be encrypted. Encrypting your chat messages using Secret Conversation is a simple process. Open up the existing chat and click on the name of the person seen at the top.
You will then be navigated to the specific contact menu, where you need to scroll down a bit to see the Secret Conversation option. Click on it!
Once the Secret Conversation is active, your new message will appear in a separate conversation section. Now the Blue bubbles appearing in your chat will be converted to Black.
However, as said earlier, once you start with the Secret Conversation, your previous chat doesn’t get encrypted. Now your conversations stream for the same person will rather split into two. One with chat encryption and the other with regular Messenger messages without encryption.
ii. Starting with a completely new Secret Conversation
In the Messenger Home Screen, click on the compose icon at the top right.
After this, click on “Secret” in the upper right corner of the screen.
Once you click on “Secret”, select the particular friend you want to begin Secret Conversation with encrypted messages. Once you have done selecting the person, a Black Lock icon under his profile image appears showing the Secret Conversation has started.
Once you are done with either of the two processes, you can have the peace-of-mind as your private chats and messages are now less vulnerable to online digital attacks. The great thing with Secret Conversations is that alike Snapchat, Facebook has kept a feature for self-destruction of messages. To enable this, click on the clock icon besides the tab where you are typing your message. Once you click that, you can set the time after which your message will be self-destructed.
Once the person at the other ends has seen your message, it will be self-destructed after the preset time.
NOTE: Once you enable this feature, it works for all the upcoming message you are about to send. Make sure you disable it in case you want your message to stay.
Its really a very handy feature, specially for the frequent users of Facebook’s Messenger App.
We hope you have understood the process well. In case of any queries, shoot us a message in the comments section below and we would be there to assist you.
