Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new feature on WhatsApp on his Facebook handle today: the ability for everyone in a disappearing message thread to save a message by holding down the long press button. The sender will be informed whether it was saved, at which point they will have the option of deciding whether or not to keep it as a permanent message.
If the sender makes the choice that the message can’t be retained by others and the decision is final, then no one else will be able to keep it, and the message will be removed after the timer expires away. What this implies is that the user has the last decision on how the protection of communications delivered is handled.
If the sender wants to unkeep any messages, the user will be notified with a prompt when pressing the undo keep button: “This is your message.” “If you choose to upkeep it, no one else can keep it again in the chat.”
If anyone in the Disappearing Message Thread tries to keep or bookmark the same message that is unkept again, a pop-up will appear: “Message cannot be kept: The author of this message has unkept it, so no one else can keep it again in the chat”.
On the other hand, messages saved on WhatsApp will be noted with a bookmark icon and can be seen, organized by chat, in the Kept Messages folder. This feature will roll out globally over the next few weeks.
