Twitter’s new proprietor, Elon Musk, has been public about his want to enhance how the social community’s direct messages work. In a gathering with staff as we speak, he spelled out precisely what that appears like.
Framed by presentation slides titled “Twitter 2.0” at Twitter’s San Fransisco headquarters on Monday, Musk instructed staff that the corporate would encrypt DMs and work so as to add encrypted video and voice calling between accounts, based on a recording of the assembly obtained by The Verge.
“We need to allow customers to have the ability to talk with out caring about their privateness, [or] with out caring a few information breach at Twitter inflicting all of their DMs to hit the net, or suppose that possibly somebody at Twitter could possibly be spying on their DMs,” Musk stated. “That’s clearly not going to be cool and it has occurred a couple of instances earlier than.”
Musk is correct about DMs being uncovered earlier than. In 2018, Twitter warned that an undisclosed variety of DMs between companies and their prospects had been accessible by outsiders for over a yr. And earlier this yr, the US authorities charged an ex-employee with improperly accessing person information on behalf of Saudi Arabia, although it’s unclear how DMs have been or weren’t used.
“It ought to be the case that I can’t take a look at anybody’s DMs if someone has put a gun to my head.”
Over time, Twitter has kickstarted after which paused constructing encrypted DMs a number of instances. However now Musk is about on rolling out encryption as a high precedence for the imaginative and prescient he’s calling Twitter 2.0. “It ought to be the case that I can’t take a look at anybody’s DMs if someone has put a gun to my head,” he instructed staff Monday.
“Satirically, Moxie Marlinspike labored at Twitter and really wished to do encrypted DMs a number of years in the past, [but] was denied that after which went and created Sign,” Musk stated. (For these curious, The Wall Road Journal has a writeup from 2015 detailing Marlinspike’s time at Twitter.)
Musk went on to say that “we additionally need to have the power to do voice and video chat through DMs.” He acknowledged that Sign requires the sharing of a telephone quantity to begin a thread and that, due to its account system, Twitter can facilitate safe calling “so that you simply don’t have to provide somebody your telephone quantity.” Sign has stated since 2020 that it is also working to maneuver away from counting on telephone numbers, although it has but to roll out that skill.
I’d ask Twitter for touch upon what Musk stated about encrypting DMs however the firm doesn’t have a communications division anymore.