Megan Squire featured on BBC Radio's 'Up All Night' program

Professor of Computer Science Megan Squire recently appeared on the BBC Radio 5 program "Up All Night" hosted by Dotun Adebayo to discuss the technology behind the integration of Facebook's messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook Messenger. 

The media appearance followed the Jan. 25 announcement of the integration, which will rely upon a unified technical infrastructure and bring together three of the world's largest messaging networks. The move will allow users to connect with each other across the various platforms, but also raised antitrust, privacy and security questions. 

Squire explained to Adebayo that all three messaging services allow users to have chats with friends, but that only WhatsApp has end-to-end encryption by default, meaning that no outsiders can read what users are saying. "By proposing to link all of these three services together, they are also saying that we are going to eventually make them all end-to-end encrypted," Squire said. "That sounds like a good thing, but there's a lot of baggage that comes along with that."

Squire said there are technical challenges that will make expanding the use of that encryption across the three platforms a time-consuming and difficult process. 

Listen to the segment featuring Squire, which begins at the 36-minute mark in the program, here.