It was released earlier by TechCrunch that Facebook had wiped messages Mark Zuckerberg and other executives had sent on Messenger. While Facebook said deleting messages from top management was a security issue, it felt kind of shady, especially considering the company recently admitted its automated systems could scan user messages (again, supposedly for altruistic reasons).
Deleting messages is also not a privilege everyone has – but it may soon be. But now Facebook tells me it plans to make an “unsend” feature available to all users in several months, and has already been considering how to build this product.
Until the Unsend feature is released for everyone, Facebook says it won’t unsend or retract any more of Zuckerberg’s messages.
In a statement to several publications, the company said:
We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages. We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.
Revealing plans for the Unsend button now could serve to dampen the backlash by making Zuckerberg look like a beta tester of the feature, and eventually normalizing Unsend as a common behavior.
According to TechCrunch, six sources confirm that Facebook messages they had received from Mark Zuckerberg had disappeared from their inboxes.
When they told Facebook they had an email receipt proving the retractions, Facebook gave TechCrunch this statement:
“After Sony Pictures’ emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”
Facebook tells TechCrunch is hasn’t finalized exactly how the Unsend feature will work.
As it stands, your messages are stored on the recipient’s account even if you delete them from your own. This new feature would theoretically erase a message permanently from everyone’s devices – as well as Facebook’s servers
Allowing users to unsend messages would certainly be a welcome move towards giving every user a right to privacy, and allow users some piece of mind should they choose to stop using Facebook’s services.
A Facebook Messenger spokesperson told TechCrunch that the only possible option is an expiration timer users can set on messages. When the timer runs out, the message would disappear from both their and the recipients’ inboxes.
They say this is similar to how retractions of Zuckerberg’s messages work.
Facebook already offers a “Secret” encrypted messaging featurethat includes an Unsend expiration timer. But this can’t be used in existing traditional Facebook message threads, and instead users have to launch a separate “Secret” conversation. Zuckerberg and other executives weren’t using this feature, and instead had their permanent, non-“Secret” messages retracted.
But in the coming months, Facebook will bring either this expiration timer or another way to Unsend messages to all Messenger threads. Facebook didn’t have details about whether recipients would be notified when a message was unsent and retracted from their inboxes, whether the feature would apply retroactively to old messages sent before the launch or whether users would need to designate a message as expiring/unsendable before they send it – but we won’t know until the feature become more concrete.
No comments:
Post a Comment