Meta is now rolling out end-to-end encryption for one-on-one chats and calls on Messenger and Facebook, finally fulfilling a promise that’s been in the works for quite awhile. When end-to-end encryption is on, only you and the person you send a message to can see its contents, the company claims.

Encrypted chats were first introduced as an opt-in feature in Messenger in 2016, but after a long windup, end-to-end encrypted messages and calls for your conversations with one person will now be the standard going forward.

“This has taken years to deliver because we’ve taken our time to get this right,” Loredana Crisan, VP of Messenger, said in a statement shared with The Verge. “Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up.”

According to Crisan, you won’t sacrifice Messenger features when using encrypted chats, so you’ll still be able to use things like themes and custom reactions. However, Crisan notes that it may “take some time” for all Messenger chats to switch over to default encryption.

While this is a good step, end-to-end encryption for group Messenger chats is still opt-in. Instagram messages are also not encrypted by default, though Meta said in August that would happen “shortly after” the rollout for default private Messenger chats.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in 2019 that the company planned to move toward encrypted ephemeral messages across its messaging apps. “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever,” he wrote in a Facebook post. “This is the future I hope we will help bring about.”

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