After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October 2022, he may have laid off many of the company’s trust and safety staff, but for more than a year, Twitter DM states how end-to-end encryption should be supported like a signal.

As far back as 2014, Twitter has play with ideas It considered introducing encryption to prevent hackers, tyrannical governments, and even Twitter itself from snooping into users’ private conversations, but the security feature never saw the light of day. .

And late last week, an encrypted direct message finally on twitter

…but not for most Twitter users…

…because Elon Musk decided that only users who paid an $8/month Twitter Blue subscription for a “verified” account could own it…

…unless the message contains images, videos or other attachments…

…does not include metadata such as where the message was sent or when it was created…

…and unless the message is being sent to a user who has not ponyed up to their Twitter Blue subscription…

…and then there’s this. In Twitter’s own words:

“As Elon Musk said, when it comes to Direct Messages, it should be the norm that if someone puts a gun to our head, we can’t access your messages. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on it.”

oh.

So this isn’t really end-to-end encryption.

This is because E2E encrypted messages can only be read by the sender and recipient. But Twitter can still read your messages, at least for now.

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I don’t think this is a feature worth paying for. And it certainly does not compete with other E2E encrypted messaging services such as: signal,Free.

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Graham Cluley is an antivirus industry veteran who has worked for many security companies since the early 1990s when he created the first version of Dr. Solomon’s Antivirus Toolkit for Windows. He is now an independent security he makes regular media appearances as an analyst and an international speaker on the subject of computer he security, hackers and online he privacy. follow him on twitter @gcluleyin Mastodon @[email protected]or send him an email.

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