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Disappearing or ephemeral Messaging has become a popular feature on social media like Snapchat and privacy-focused communication apps like Signal, Telegram, and Wire. It doesn’t stop the people you’re chatting with from taking or logging screenshots of your chats, but it makes your old messages less likely to come back to haunt you in unforeseen ways. Now WhatsApp, one of the world’s largest platforms that offers end-to-end encryption by default for all its chats, is launching a version of the feature. But it has some limitations.
Starting today, WhatsApp will begin to implement the option for users to enable messages that disappear in chats one by one; Administrators will have the option to enable the feature in group chats. Disappearing messages should be available globally by the end of the month. However, unlike other services, WhatsApp will not offer granular options (one hour, one day, one month) for the time until the messages disappear. Instead, the function will be more minimalist. Each chat will start with the feature disabled by default, and whichever party chooses to enable it will trigger a seven-day automatic kill window. Your messages will be deleted one week after they are sent or received.
“Our goal is to make conversations on WhatsApp feel as close to in-person conversations as possible, which means they shouldn’t have to stick around forever,” WhatsApp said in a blog post shared with WIRED ahead of launch. “We started with seven days because we think it offers the peace of mind that the conversations are not permanent, and at the same time they remain practical so you don’t forget what you were chatting about.
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It’s true that keeping track of conversations can be difficult when messages are automatically deleted after an hour or a day. But most messaging platforms offer the option while they’re at it so that users can choose the increment that best suits their privacy and security needs. Even Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp’s sister platform, offers granular controls for disappearing messages in its end-to-end encrypted secret conversation feature.
WhatsApp users now send around 100 billion messages per day on the platform, making it a significant privacy improvement in terms of scale. But it comes with caveats beyond the fixed deletion window. Activating disappearing messages will not change any other dynamics of how the application works, which means that users will still be able to forward messages from one WhatsApp chat to another. If you forward a message from a chat with disappearing messages enabled to one that has the feature disabled, the forwarding will be enabled in the new chat. Also, if you reply to a message that disappears, the quoted message will not automatically disappear at the same time as the original. You will need to delete manually or wait until the response reaches its own seven-day deadline.
