Facebook has long believed that end-to-end encryption is the right answer to help protect user privacy. However, the company has previously not offered the same selection of features for its encrypted chats that it has for its standard Messenger platform. However, that’s about to change. This week, the company announced that it will begin offering features like chat themes, group profile photos, custom emojis, link previews and more for all end-to-end encrypted chats.

In addition to these new features, the company also said that it is continuing the explore the possibility of making end-to-end encryption the default privacy setting for all Messenger users.

“We’ve also started gradually expanding testing default end-to-end encryption for Messenger,” Meta product manager Melissa Miranda wrote in a blog post. “We know people want a space to connect and they want to know that those conversations are private, safe and secure. That is why we’ve spent time building a team of talented engineers, cryptologists, designers and policy experts who are all committed to rolling out default end-to-end encryption on Messenger.”

While protecting user privacy is undoubtedly a great goal, Facebook’s efforts have been complicated by advocates and lawmakers who believe encryption could help shield bad actors. For now, at least users who take advantage of encryption have more features than they did before.

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