Meta Platform announced on Wednesday that it has begun encrypting all conversations and personal calls on Messenger and Facebook.
The giant social media company can determine the exact details of users immediately, but it may take some time until all Messenger accounts are updated with encryption only to be within the privacy settings.
Meta stated that the Messenger program of Facebook previously had the option to turn on the partial identification feature, allowing messages to be read by the sender and recipient only, but with this new message, the messages will be automatically encrypted.
The company called Meta, which runs its WhatsApp software, already encrypts messages, and it can help protect users from hacks, scammers, and criminals.
Evolving an internal tool into an external product at scale on Facebook
The idea for this Workplace feature began at a company hackathon in the London office. As they thought about how our external customers might use Safety Check for Workplace, they had to reevaluate our entire design with enhanced scale, speed, and accuracy for enterprises in mind. They realized this would require some new design considerations and a revision of the entire product for the Workplace platform.
At its core, the internal tool was built on a database that was not scalable for a product that might need to support millions of people across multiple companies. To address this, They moved the storage to TAO, Facebook’s distributed data store for the social graph, where Workplace information resides. With the move to an external product, they could no longer rely on our standard internal access management and data security controls. So They created their module for access management and strong privacy checks. As they continued the journey to build a life safety system at scale, they focused on three major parts of the product workflow: locate, notify, and iterate.
Mechanism of modification on Facebook
As designated security operators use Safety Check to locate, notify, and iterate, they have an additional technical challenge to solve how we handle responses. An important consideration is to ensure that the counts fully match the responses in real-time. To do this, we store people’s statuses as edges on a graph to a Safety Check, for quick and accurate querying. Furthermore, when dealing with high request volume, we funnel all the requests via a queuing system to make sure we don’t lose any numbers, but we update the actual status immediately to provide current information for security and HR teams.
This system is built with open-source technologies such as React, Relay, GraphQL, and Hack. The status updates leverage the GraphQL subscription, which, as part of page load, subscribes to all status change events so they update in real-time.
Building on what we do with Safety Check for the FB community, It also performs extensive simulations to assess resiliency for extreme notification and response workloads. These simulations are run programmatically to ensure we continually test the underlying infrastructure and services on which They rely. They do this through scripts that run at various times throughout the day (as a crisis can occur at any time in any place) on a test instance that creates a crisis, locates large volumes of people, notifies them, and receives random spikes of responses.
