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Communications

WhatsApp Now Lets You Post Ephemeral Messages That Disappear After 7 Days (techcrunch.com) 26

Facebook recently announced that WhatsApp passed the whopping milestone of 100 billion messages sent per day, but not everyone wants those chats to stick around forever. Now, Facebook's wildly popular messaging app with 2 billion users is adding a feature to give people more control on how their words and pictures live within the app. From today, messages -- including photos and videos -- can now be marked to disappear after 7 days. From a report: Disappearing messages are being rolled out globally across Android and iOS starting today, WhatsApp said. While it's starting with a 7 day lifespan, it is already looking at playing around with the time limits. "We will keep an eye on feedback about how people are using it and liking it and see if it needs adjusting in the future," a spokesperson said. "For now we are starting with seven days, because it feels like a nice balance between the utility you need for global text based conversations and the feeling of things not sticking around forever." And just to be clear, the 7-day limit will exist regardless of whether the message gets read or not. (The disappearing message clock starts counting when the message is sent, as it does on other apps like Telegram.)
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WhatsApp Now Lets You Post Ephemeral Messages That Disappear After 7 Days

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  • Useless feature is useless.

    These days I save and/or screenshot anything I think might be important later...

    • The key phrase is "might be important". Capturing and indexing screenshots for everything is tedious, and the idea here is that you can't dig up someone's past by simply searching over their message history.
      • There have been cases of social media content getting scraped en masse as soon as its posted. Every item posted to a certain platform over 10+ years was uploaded on BitTorrent, including since-deleted items.

        That was on a more traditional web-based service, so I'm not sure how well that might apply on a messaging app. Based on the Zuckergarten's previous huge data leaks through its API, I wouldn't trust it. I would trust even less that the Zuck isn't keeping a copy for himself.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @11:42AM (#60687738) Homepage Journal

          WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption using the Signal protocol. In theory there is no way Facebook could have a plaintext copy of those messages to leak. It might not be true but disassembling the binary for Android shows that it does at least contain the Signal code, and looking at the packets the data sent out is encrypted somehow.

          So this may actually be a fairly useful function. Since the police can't hack WhatsApp they usually try to unlock one of the participant's phones and get their chat history from there. With this turned on they will at most get the last 7 days.

          • by khchung ( 462899 )

            WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption using the Signal protocol. In theory there is no way Facebook could have a plaintext copy of those messages to leak. It might not be true but disassembling the binary for Android shows that it does at least contain the Signal code, and looking at the packets the data sent out is encrypted somehow.

            The problem with closed source application is you will never know if WhatsApp *also* send a duplicated copy of all your messages to FB encrypted with FB's public key.

            It takes a fool to believe FB won't do anything underhanded to steal your data.

            • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

              They might be doing that, but what good would it do them? If they used any information they got from your chats it would soon become apparent what they were doing, and you could easily prove it by talking about stuff in a chat and then waiting to see if you get ads for it. It would also be a huge GDPR violation, big fine if caught.

              Maybe they would do it to help law enforcement, perhaps on an individual account basis. But law enforcement often complains that Facebook doesn't help them and is unable to recove

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      On Android the app can set a flag that prevents the user taking screenshots. It also blacks out the app's thumbnail in the app switcher etc.

    • The one place they will never disappear-Facebook archives.
  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday November 05, 2020 @10:38AM (#60687512)

    Lots of people never delete anything, my wife's phone looks like somebody having used Lotus Notes for 10 years without deleting anything.

    • I don't delete anything. I have emails that go back to 2002 when I started with my own server. Why not delete old stuff by default? Because every so often you dig out something important. Attempting to judge today what will be important tomorrow is difficult. Sure OTPs that are valid for 60 seconds are easy, but not everything is like that.

      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I don't delete anything. I have emails that go back to 2002 when I started with my own server. Why not delete old stuff by default? Because every so often you dig out something important. Attempting to judge today what will be important tomorrow is difficult. Sure OTPs that are valid for 60 seconds are easy, but not everything is like that.

        Exactly.

        First, disk space has grown to the point where I can keep everything. I had to delete old emails - I mean, 100K email and attachments added up on a 320MB hard dis

  • by fleeped ( 1945926 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @11:53AM (#60687788)

    Fat chance, it will feed the big data machine as usual, which will remember everything, either you want it to, or not.

  • That message will disappear from everywhere but FBs data collection servers. lol

    • Agreed - people will need to read the fine print on this "Disappears After Seven Days(but is still stashed somewhere, somehow, in the big fat machine learning engine, and can be pulled out when the FBI/NSA/et. al. come knocking)"

      This could work:
      1. Send inflammatory message on seven day expiry threatening to kill someone.
      2. Wait for FBI et. al. to come knocking and arrest you.
      3. Sue Facebook for false advertising, breach of privacy, etc.
      4. $$$$ Profit!
  • by trawg ( 308495 ) on Thursday November 05, 2020 @05:34PM (#60689254) Homepage

    It's sorta interesting the announcement post from Whatsapp and at least the page of other documentation I read only uses the word 'disappear', with no mention of the word 'delete', or any other real explanation about what disappearing means from a technical level.

    Given it is E2E, I guess we're expected to assume that it doesn't matter? Given FB's tendency to never delete anything it feels hard to believe they're just actually blowing this data away.

    Not sure how relevant it is for most people, but I can imagine a scenario where a user who thought their messages were gone forever was surprised to be confronted with them in court after Facebook were compelled to recover them on behalf of the person they were exchanging messages with, or something.

    • the DEA, FBI, ETC will file to get the logs and if they have an court ordered tap on an line they better not delete them

    • What do you luddites mean with "delete" anyway?

      On a memory read/write and pointer level.

      Disappear seems more safe as "delete".
      The latter is implemented by marking the space and pointer to it as re-usable on any normal OS out there.
      The former by definition requires the data to be gone. which can only be done via overwriting or physically destroying the hardware.

  • It is my CPU. WA is providing code. Nothing more.
    I decide whether or how to execute that, or what else to run.

    Also, scrcpy is a thing.

    Makes clear how completely clueless they are about computers.
    This is in the "series of tubes" league.

I had the rare misfortune of being one of the first people to try and implement a PL/1 compiler. -- T. Cheatham

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