The Twitter that we see in the present day is sort of unrecognizable from the one which Elon Musk purchased for $44 billion in late 2022 and now the social community has launched a brand new function that was promised manner again then — encrypted direct messages.
The brand new encrypted DMs have now gone reside for the primary time with folks in a position to decide on whether or not they really wish to use it when creating a brand new thread. What’s extra, they’ll additionally select to ship an encrypted message by way of a thread that was beforehand unencrypted.
And it is all reside now — assuming you are prepared to pay for it.
No encryption for you
Twitter has a brand new assist web page (opens in new tab) that explains how encrypted DMs work, and whereas it’s totally wordy it does do its greatest at getting the job completed. “Twitter seeks to be essentially the most trusted platform on the web, and encrypted Direct Messages are an necessary a part of that,” the web page begins.
It then units out the plan. “As Elon Musk stated, on the subject of Direct Messages, the usual must 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’s not “fairly there but.” Nonetheless, encrypted messages are right here.
Nevertheless, they’re solely accessible if each the sender and recipient of the DM occur to be verified. That would 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 clarification is that it’s going to “generate a pair of machine particular keys, known as personal and public key pair.” It goes on, including that “the general public secret is routinely registered when a person logs into Twitter on a brand new machine or browser; the personal key by no means leaves the machine and due to this fact isn’t communicated to Twitter.”
From there, we be taught 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 change the dialog key securely between taking part gadgets.”
In fact, none of that issues for those who aren’t paying for Twitter, and, if stories (opens in new tab) are true, few folks really are.
