Last year, WhatsApp introduced an ephemeral messages feature. However, these messages last for seven days, which is a really long time for something that should disappear after sending.
Thankfully, the chat app is working on a new mode that lets you send ephemeral images, and those disappear as soon as you leave the chat.
[Read: WhatsApp will ease you into accepting its privacy policy with a banner]
There are a couple of important things to note here. First, you can’t save these photos in your gallery or copy them to another app. That’s good because you don’t want your sensitive photos being exported out of the app.
WhatsApp is working on self-destructing photos in a future update for iOS and Android.
• Self-destructing photos cannot be exported from WhatsApp.
• WhatsApp didn’t implement a screenshot detection for self-destructing photos yet.Same concept from Instagram Direct. ⏱ pic.twitter.com/LLsezVL2Hj
— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) March 3, 2021
However, there’s no screenshot detection feature as of yet. So, someone could potentially take a screenshot to keep a record of an ephemeral photo. WABetaInfo noted that disappearing messages in Instagram Direct works in the same way.
Since this feature is under development, it hasn’t even made it to the test versions of the app. But we’ll keep an eye out for when it’s out, and write a detailed guide on how to send disappearing images in WhatsApp.
Did you know we have a newsletter all about consumer tech? It’s called Plugged In – and you can subscribe to it right here.
Published March 3, 2021 — 12:26 UTC