Keep your messages safe from prying eyes

End-to-end encryption keeps your messages just between you and the person you're messaging. Ensuring privacy and security from prying eyes along the way.

Think about the last few messages you’ve sent to family or friends. A cringe joke, your address, or maybe a really personal problem you needed some advice on. Whatever it was, chances are you intended it for one person to read and not the entire internet.

That’s where end-to-end encryption (E2E encryption) comes in. It's a way of protecting your messages, photos, videos, voice or video calls so only you and the person you’re sending them to can read them. Not hackers, or service providers. Theoretically, not even the company who makes the app you’re using.

How does it work? When you send a message, the app uses a key to scramble it into unreadable code. The person you’re sending the message to also has the key, so they can unlock it and unscramble the message. This all happens in the background without you even noticing… in most apps.

Apps like WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and Google Messages offer E2E encryption as a standard feature. Telegram also offers it, but you might need to enable it manually in the settings.

Importantly however, regular SMS messages don’t use end-to-end encryption so you should think twice before sending sensitive information through SMS.

Of course, no system is perfect. E2E’s main goal is to stop anyone from reading your messages while it’s in transit, but if someone gets access to your device they also gain access to the encryption key. For example, if your phone was compromised (through a phishing attack or if it was stolen) someone could access your private chats.

Still, E2E encryption is one of the best tools we have to keep our digital conversations private and secure – so you can keep those sensitive conversations locked and safe from prying eyes.

Want to learn more about keeping your information safe online?
Visit our Tips for staying safe online page.