End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption keeps a message readable only by the sender and recipient, which protects privacy but can also limit what parental tools or platforms can see. Understanding this trade-off helps parents set realistic expectations about monitoring; the official explainer below covers how it works.
Official source: ssd.eff.org →
The property is structural rather than a setting: it describes who holds the keys, which is why it cannot be enabled for the participants and suspended for an observer. A tool able to read the message is, by construction, not outside it.
What that covers in practice differs by application — backups, metadata and group messages are not automatically included — and those details are published by each application rather than by the explainer cited here.
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Sources
What this page is based on — every source is verified, and links out whenever the document is still reachable.
- Verified / official
- Provisional
- Out of date