Unless you are living under a rock, I am sure that most of you are aware of WhatsApp and actually use it on a daily basis too. Over the years, WhatsApp has come with a lot of new features that has made staying in contact with your friends and family easier. Well, this Facebook-owned company has taken inspiration from Snapchat and a few other apps in terms of privacy and is currently working on a new feature that will allow the users to select a self-destruct timer for the images that they share on WhatsApp chats.
Now, this feature works exactly as you would expect it to.
When you send an image in a chat, you have the option to set a self-destruct timer. Once you do this, it will prompt the app to delete the image immediately after it has been viewed by the recipient. This way, people won’t be able to save vanishing images on their device and your privacy will be protected.
WhatsApp is testing this feature with a few iPhone users right now. There is no concrete information on when this feature will be launched for everyone else as WhatsApp can even choose to drop this feature if it doesn’t pass the test.
The only thing is that they haven’t performed any global setting which will allow the users to self-destruct images for all the chats as Telegram did recently. And while we haven’t heard much about screenshot-detection feature yet, we know that WhatsApp is working on it. This way, if the receiver attempts to take a screenshot of a self-destructing photo, then an alert would be sent to the sender.
Limited Privacy with This Feature
There are a lot of messaging and social media apps that are offering the feature of vanishing media to the users to protect their privacy. And it looks like WhatsApp users could gain the ability to send private images that can only be viewed once too. However, this might not offer complete privacy to the users as there is still no feature to stop the people from recording screenshots of images.
Moreover, there is no way to know if some users end up using a second smartphone to take a photo of the disappearing image that they would have received on WhatsApp on their primary device.
But this is an essential feature if Facebook wishes to consolidate all its messaging services together into a single, iMessage-type service.
