Facebook announced today (August 13) that it will offer users the option of end-to-end encryption for voice and video calls made on Messenger, one of its two instant messaging apps.

"People expect messaging apps to be secure and private, and these new features will give them more control over how private they want their calls and chats to be," said Facebook's Messenger Product Management Director, Ruth Kricheli, wrote in a company blog post.

The move comes five years after Messenger introduced a similar "secret conversation" option; WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook in 2014, introduced full end-to-end encryption in 2016.

"The content of a message or call in an end-to-end encrypted conversation is protected from the moment it leaves your device to the moment it reaches the recipient's device," Cricelli explains. This means that no one else, including Facebook, can see or hear what was sent or said."

Cricelli wrote that Facebook Messenger also gives users more control over the length of messages that disappear within an end-to-end encrypted chat, "from 5 seconds to 24 hours."

But that's not all, as the TV commercials say. In the "coming weeks," Messenger will "begin testing end-to-end encryption for group chats, including voice and video calls, for friends and family who already have chat threads or are already connected," Kricheli wrote.

And she added that Facebook is testing a similar option for Instagram direct messages.

"We will also begin limited testing with adults in certain countries who can opt-in to end-to-end encrypted messages and calls for one-on-one conversations on Instagram," Kricheli wrote. As with how Messenger currently works, "to get started with end-to-end encrypted DMs, you need to have an existing chat or be following each other.