Meta’s messaging app, in an action that determines the fate of user messages in WhatsApp, announced its intention to launch a new feature to delete chat messages after a period specified by the user.
And as a social media expert explains to Sky News Arabia, the new service in the future will require more reliance on email for long-term storage of important documents, and WhatsApp will be limited to short-term messaging.
If the user activates the new privacy feature through a combination of options to make the messages disappear 24 hours, 7 days or 90 days after sending, the old messages will disappear automatically.
Mohammed al-Harti, a social media expert, says the feature, which he describes as “extraordinary and important,” will be optional and will not affect messages that the user has already sent or received in chat.
The social media expert adds: “This feature, which includes text, image and video, is designed to protect the privacy of the user’s messages, by eliminating messages he does not want to keep for long. He just “To enable the ability to disappear to disappear messages sent from the other party’s phone and device.”
However, the expert warns against providing complete security to this feature, Al-Harti explains: “The automatic disappearance of messages from WhatsApp conversations does not mean that they are removed from the application servers, servers that store large amounts of data. Maintain, the fate of the user does not know, but is governed by international standards and laws.
As for the possibility of activating this feature, it does not matter if the user has an iPhone or Android, the steps are the same for both devices.
All he has to do is open WhatsApp, then click on the three vertical dots at the top left of the screen, go to Settings, then press Account Settings and go to the Privacy option to find the default message timer do. At the bottom of the privacy page and finally specify how long it takes for messages to disappear.
The social networking expert continues, but not only is privacy a feature provided by the new feature, but it also helps keep the phone memory clean and free of duplicate conversations and saved media.
It is also believed that this feature will change the culture of some users in dealing with WhatsApp, which they see as a way to store data.
Al-Harti concludes that the new feature will limit the role of WhatsApp to instant chat, so that correspondence of important documents and articles will be via email. Because it provides more digital security.
Source: Lebanon Debate
