The Twitter that we see right now is nearly unrecognizable from the one which Elon Musk purchased for $44 billion in late 2022 and now the social community has launched a brand new characteristic that was promised manner again then — encrypted direct messages.
The brand new encrypted DMs have now gone stay for the primary time with individuals ready to decide on whether or not they really need to use it when creating a brand new thread. What’s extra, they will additionally select to ship an encrypted message by way of a thread that was beforehand unencrypted.
And it is all stay now — assuming you are keen to pay for it.
No encryption for you
Twitter has a brand new help web page (opens in new tab) that explains how encrypted DMs work, and whereas it is very wordy it does do its greatest at getting the job executed. “Twitter seeks to be essentially the most trusted platform on the web, and encrypted Direct Messages are an vital a part of that,” the web page begins.
It then units out the plan. “As Elon Musk stated, in the case of Direct Messages, the usual needs to be, if somebody places a gun to our heads, we nonetheless can’t entry your messages,” the web page continues earlier than admitting that it is not “fairly there but.” Nonetheless, encrypted messages are right here.
Nonetheless, they’re solely accessible if each the sender and recipient of the DM occur to be verified. That might imply they’re a part of a verified group or, extra seemingly, that they are paying for Twitter Blue.
As for the way it’s encrypted, Twitter’s rationalization is that it’s going to “generate a pair of machine particular keys, referred to as non-public and public key pair.” It goes on, including that “the general public secret’s routinely registered when a person logs into Twitter on a brand new machine or browser; the non-public key by no means leaves the machine and subsequently is rarely communicated to Twitter.”
From there, we study that there is additionally “a per dialog key that’s used to encrypt the content material of messages. The private-public key pairs are used to trade the dialog key securely between taking part gadgets.”
In fact, none of that issues when you aren’t paying for Twitter, and, if studies (opens in new tab) are true, few individuals really are.
