For over 2 years now, WhatsApp has offered its over 2 billion users the ability to send messages that disappear after some time – either a day, a week, or even several months (3), depending on what you choose.
When it launched, this was supposed to be a privacy protection )and we can guess it is still intended to be that way), as WhatsApp caught up with rivals Telegram and Signal who had been having the feature for a while. Heck, Snapchat’s entire popularity in its early days was based on ephemeral messaging which remains the core of the “story” feature on almost all social apps – even Twitter had a go at it before giving up.
However, a new feature targeting the disappearing messages feature announced 2 days ago and already available to everyone, makes us doubt that.
WhatsApp now lets users request to “keep in chat” any messages meant to self-destruct shortly after posting, something that flies in the face of the disappearing messages feature being a privacy protection.
The silver lining here is that the sender gets to decide if the recipient can keep the message or not as they have to ask.
“We believe if you’ve sent the message, it’s your choice whether others in the chat can keep it for later,” says WhatsApp in a post on its blog.
“To make this work, the sender will be notified when someone keeps a message, and the sender will have the ability to veto the decision. If you’ve decided your message can’t be kept by others, your decision is final, no one else can keep it and the message will be deleted when the timer expires. This way you have the final say on how messages you send are protected.”
“Messages you’ve saved on your WhatsApp will be noted with a bookmark icon and you can see these messages, organized by chat, in the Kept Messages folder.”
WhatsApp has consistently chipped away at the disappearing messages feature over the years. At launch, messages would only stick around for a week (7 days) before self-destructing. Later, options for 24 hours and 90 days were also introduced, allowing users the shortest time possible to keep a chat and, at the same time, giving them the longest time to hang on to messages. Now, that period can be changed to “indefinitely”.
