But then, there is a catch. You must delete the message within 10 minutes of sending it. The sort time span that Facebook is giving its users makes WhatsApp’s 1-hour time span for deleting messages look so much better in comparison. The change was first spotted by The Verge and it is reportedly listed as ‘coming soon’ in the release notes of Messenger for iOS version 1919.0. Earlier this year in April, TechCrunch had reported that the social networking giant had secretly been deleting messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives from inboxes belonging to other people. Facebook had said that it had taken certain steps to enhance corporate security post the Sony Pictures hack of 2014. But during the Cambridge Analytica scandal that happened this year, this admission only dented the company’s reputation further. After the demand for this feature grew, Facebook promised to roll it out to all. However, there are still some questions that remain. For instance, will the company inform the recipient that a message sent to them has been retracted? We will have to wait for the feature to roll out to find out. Popular messaging app WhatsApp, which is also owned by Facebook, got the feature to recall messages in October 2017. While earlier the time-limit to retract messages on WhatsApp was limited to 7 mins, it was later extended to 1 hour 8 minutes and 16 seconds. However, it was recently reported that the feature on WhatsApp will soon be getting a ‘Recipient Limit.’ Post the update, a message sent on WhatsApp will only get deleted if revoke request reaches the recipient within 13 hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds. So in case it doesn’t within the said period, maybe because the recipient’s phone is off or in no-network area, the sender would not be able to recall the message. However, senders wouldn’t have to do anything extra for it and the entire process will happen at the back-end.
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