Mozilla Foundation launches petition to retain Instagram encryption
by Piyush Mathur
The Mozilla Foundation—a non-profit organisation based in Mountain View, California, United States—has launched an online petition urging Meta Platforms (Meta) to retain end-to-end-encryption on Instagram direct messages (DMs). This is a feature Meta has decided to discontinue on Instagram from May 8, 2026, according to a March 18 report by the UK’s Guardian.
Instagram’s Help Centre and related posts confirm that support for end-to-end encryption in DMs will be removed in early May, meaning messages will no longer be protected so only sender and recipient can read them.
The move has raised privacy concerns among advocates who argue that removing encryption could expose user conversations to greater visibility by the platform or third parties. An incisive March 20, 2026, report in Wired, authored by Lily Hay Newman, set out these arguments.
Mozilla’s petition appears to have been initiated in late February 2026; it aligns with wider digital privacy advocacy.
Readers can view and sign the petition here: https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/petitions/keep-encryption-for-instagram/
Notably, Meta Platforms is also based in California, albeit in Menlo Park; operating at the time as Facebook, it acquired Instagram on April 9, 2012.
Piyush Mathur, PhD, is a member of Internet Society and the Coalition for Independent Technology Research.