Facebook will introduce unsend option for private messages
Facebook is going to introduce an unsend function for its Messenger chats after it became known that private messages from top man Mark Zuckerberg had been removed from the inboxes of recipients. Now it is only possible for Facebook leaders, as it turned out on Friday.
On Friday TechCrunch published the news, based on three sources, that Facebook and other leaders of the company had their messages from other people’s inboxes deleted. This came to light because TechCrunch could still find old messages from Zuckerberg via e-mail notifications, but in Messenger they were nowhere to be found.
The removal would have been done to protect the communications of leaders, something that the company would would have started after the hack on Sony Pictures, in 2014. To date, however, Facebook has never publicly announced that it does this. But not even half a day after the publication of the TechCrunch piece, Facebook announced that this option would not only be limited to Facebook personnel themselves.
For ordinary users, it is only possible to receive messages sent and received on their side. The other person in the conversation can keep the messages on his side for as long as he would like. The unsend option must be available to users within a few months. Facebook says that it has been working behind the scenes for some time, but also apologizes that the function has been delayed.
The function is separate from the secret conversation option that the mobile Messenger app offers. Here you can delete messages on both sides based on a timer. How the new delete function of Facebook will work is not yet clear. Also, it is not yet known whether it will work for messages that are sent before the function sees the light.