We’ve all known that Telegram is WhatsApp’s rival, that gained 3 million followers when Facebook didn’t work a day, this month. Now the app has come with a privacy-focus update. The latest version of Telegram is available on Android and iOS. You can delete messages for all participants in your chat, and it doesn’t matter who sent it and when they sent it.
Before this, Telegram allowed its users a 48-hour window, in which they were free to delete their own sent messages, from their devices and others. The time limit is now dropped, and you can delete the entire chat history from your device and from anyone else’s who is part of the chat. For some, this might seem extreme, but the founder said that it’s a way in which people can control their digital history.
Why is this feature important for Telegram users?
Perhaps an old message can be used against you in the future, if taken out of the context. An acid text could haunt you when you decide to do something really important with your career. Despite the fact that the messages come with encryption and privacy, we still have little control of our data.
Giving people the green light to avoid awkward situations from past texts is what Telegram wants to do.
The implementation of this new privacy measure could fail. It does not leave a notification that a message from a chat has ever existed before you deleted it. Which means that, if someone ever gets bored, they could get your chat history, forget about the essential context, and misrepresent all the words. This ability is perhaps too much, but given the fact that Telegram put this effort to allow its users to delete entire convos, it was quite unavoidable.
Tim M. Hill helped bring Digital-Overload from a weekly newsletter to a full-fledged news site by creating a new website and branding. He continues to assist in keeping the site responsive and well organized for the readers. As a writer to Digital-Overload, Tim mainly covers mobile news and gadgets.
