On Monday, Twitter CEO Elon Musk detailed the improvements that the company is looking to implement when it comes to Twitter Direct Messages (DMs).
Musk confirmed that the company is working on encrypting DMs, consistent with previous reports. "We want to enable users to be able to communicate without being concerned about their privacy, without being concerned about a data breach at Twitter causing all of their DMs to hit the web, or think that maybe someone at Twitter could be spying on their DMs," Musk said in his presentation. "That’s obviously not going to be cool and it has happened a few times before."
Back in 2018, Twitter admitted that a bug present in one of its APIs caused some messages to leak to certain third-party programmers. The bug reportedly affected only 1% of Twitter users, but given that there were 340 million Twitter users at the time, this percentage equated to 3.4 million accounts.
Twitter has been working on encrypted DMs since 2018, but the feature never saw the light of day for some reason. This time, however, the capability is a priority for the company.
Musk also praised encrypted chat app Signal during his presentation. He said that Signal"s creator, Moxie Marlinspike, is "potentially willing to help out” in making encrypted Twitter DMs happen. "Ironically, Moxie Marlinspike worked at Twitter and actually wanted to do encrypted DMs several years ago, [but] was denied that and then went and created Signal," Musk said.
Aside from encrypted DMs, Twitter is also looking into the possibility of doing voice and video chats via DMs. Musk acknowledges that unlike Signal, which requires users to exchange phone numbers to start a thread, Twitter"s account system will allow for secure calling so users don"t have to give others their number.
Source: The Verge