WhatsApp could defeat the purpose of its disappearing messages
WhatsApp has been developingplenty of new features, with more than a few of them feeling like responses to help the appkeep up with its competition. Sometimes, though, those new additions leave us feeling confounded and scratching our head, because they seem to undo capabilities introduced in earlier updates. WhatsApp could be up to some degree of back-pedaling right now, as we hear about development of an option to retain messages otherwise set to disappear.
To be clear,WhatsApp’s disappearing messagesaren’t foolproof. Just like we see withview-once media, the intended recipients could always take screenshots of messages before they vanish. Perhaps recognizing how easy this was to work around, it looks like the company would rather just embrace the practice, and recently we’ve been hearing about WhatsApp developing a new option for keeping messages. The capability was firstuncovered in May, and the folks atWABetaInfo(ViaPhandroid) now explain how it could work, after uncovering a message box for the service’s desktop client
A new alert for the disappearing messages feature mentions anyone will be able to keep or un-keep messages in the chat. This means if messages are set to disappear after a predefined period, they can escape deletion and live on in the chat if the sender or recipient decides to save them. The alert also shows how in group chats, every participant would be able to keep and un-keep messages for everyone in the chat, but a privacy setting allowing administrators to limit this could be in the works too.
The option to keep ephemeral messages absolutely feels like it defeats their very purpose, but that’s clearly not stopping anyone. So far, not even beta testers have access to the active feature, and while we’ve seen this progress on desktop, the ultimate plans for its release on desktop, Android, and iPhone alike are still uncertain. But who knows — your days of covertly taking a screenshot of a message may soon be over.
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