WhatsApp is working on new chat privacy feature

There will be a new mode for automatically disappearing messages in WhatsApp. As soon as you activate it, all new conversations consist of messages that automatically disappear after a day. Although there is a catch for those who care about their privacy.

‘Disappearing Mode’

WhatsApp made its expiration messages available to a wider group of users last year. If you activate the function in a specific conversation, all new messages will disappear after one day. WhatsApp now wants to go one step further with this privacy feature thanks to a new ‘disappearing mode’.

It was the reliable WABetaInfo data that first wrote about this new feature. If you use messages with expiration date you have to activate them for each individual chat, and new conversations will still come without disappearing messages. Not anymore if you use the ‘disappearing mode’, because then the messages of all new conversations automatically disappear. You can simply turn on that function from the settings.

The disappearing mode

The catch

Yet there is also one major drawback to this upcoming feature. WhatsApp also works on disappearing videos and photos at the same time, but recently it became known that there will be no way for the app to detect whether the recipient takes a screenshot of your disappearing message.

In other apps like Snapchat you get a warning every time the other takes a screenshot, but WhatsApp does not think of such a way to protect the privacy of users. In other words, others can take screenshots of your messages to their heart’s content without you ever knowing, and with that, the usefulness of disappearing messages and disappearing mode is lost.

availabilty

At this point, the disappearing mode is not yet active in the app. What do you think, are you still looking forward to the launch of this feature or is it an empty box? Let us know in the comments at the bottom of this article.

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