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(042522 BOSTON, MA): A demonstrator holds a sign during a rally calling for affordable MBTA fares for those with a low-income held outside the Park St T station on April 25, 2022 in BOSTON, MA. (Staff Photo By Nancy Lane/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald)

Agency staffers are developing the details of a low-income fare program that would expand reduced fare options for certain groups, including students, young adults, seniors and people with disabilities.

The pending policy could reach between 50,000-60,000 riders over the first five years, said Steven Povich, the MBTAs senior director of fare policy and analytics.

Estimates show that there are roughly 60,000 adults ages 26 to 64 who have incomes under 200% of the federal poverty level but have no reduced MBTA fare benefits, Povich said. Slashing their fares in half could translate into $720 in annual savings for daily bus and subway riders, and $1,908 for certain commuter rail riders.

This is really significant savings for our riders across our network, whether youre a frequent or infrequent rider, whether youre on the bus and subway network, or the commuter rail, Povich said. The annual savings are really material.

Meta is rolling out end-to-end encryption for calls and messages across its Facebook and Messenger platforms, the company announced Thursday.

Such encryption means that no one other than the sender and the recipient not even Meta can decipher peoples messages. Encrypted chats, first introduced as an optional feature in Messenger in 2016, will now be the standard for all users going forward, according to Messenger head Loredana Crisan.

This has taken years to deliver because weve taken our time to get this right, Crisan wrote in a blog post. Our engineers, cryptographers, designers, policy experts and product managers have worked tirelessly to rebuild Messenger features from the ground up.

The new features will be available immediately, but Crisan wrote that it would take some time for the privacy feature to be rolled out to all of its users.

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Ticker: MBTA expanding fare discounts; Meta rolls out end-to-end encryption - Boston Herald