WhatsApp Wants to Host Your Intimate Chats. Don't Fret -- They'll Be Deleted in a Week.
November 06 2020 - 3:19PM
Dow Jones News
By Katie Deighton
Facebook Inc.'s WhatsApp has introduced a setting that
automatically deletes messages after seven days, a move aimed at
encouraging users to feel comfortable chatting in confidence.
The feature, which as of this month can be applied to both
one-to-one and group chats, is meant to make chats feel more like
face-to-face conversations than imperishable email threads or text
messages do, said Zafir Khan, product manager at WhatsApp.
Records of most in-person conversations don't exist forever, so
conversations on WhatsApp shouldn't have to either, according to
Mr. Khan.
"Things like text messages had a very different use case over a
decade ago -- they were used more for one-off coordination, because
of the limited characters and the spottiness of connection," he
said. "But now smartphones have proliferated and people always have
their phones with them, they're using WhatsApp messaging for very
deep and intimate conversations."
That led WhatsApp's product team to rethink its assumptions
about how the service should work, Mr. Khan said. They hope the new
feature will encourage more people to host personal conversations
on the platform, confident that their messages won't come back to
haunt them, he said.
The feature may also help Facebook boost engagement on WhatsApp,
according to Miguel Alvarez, global chief technology officer of
digital agency AnalogFolk Ltd. He said users may check in on
conversations more if they are afraid of missing something
important. People in group chats may also be motivated to chime in
to keep WhatsApp conversations from going empty, he added.
"Data and privacy are clearly important in this," Mr. Alvarez
said, "but really it almost forces users to keep a conversation
ongoing."
The concept of sending a disappearing message was popularized in
the early 2010s by Snapchat, which let users send ephemeral photos
to their contacts.
Snapchat's novel messaging experience alarmed some people, said
Ysabel Gerrard, lecturer in digital media and society at the
University of Sheffield. Critics feared that disappearing messages
would make it harder to hold people accountable for their actions
online and risked enabling behavior such as cyberbullying and
nonconsensual sharing of sexual imagery, she said.
Those concerns died down as the format became more familiar, she
said.
Telegram Group Inc., one of WhatsApp's biggest competitors, also
offers a "self-destructing messages" option within its messenger
product, letting users set a time limit on the visibility of their
messages and media. Some Twitter users likewise set their feeds to
auto-delete.
WhatsApp believes the seven-day deletion period gives its system
an advantage over apps that erase messages as soon as they are
read, meaning people can forget what they have been talking about
or lose useful information, he said.
"In testing we found that seven days is long enough that you
won't forget what you're talking about, but still short enough that
you're given peace of mind that this is a place where you can have
a free conversation," Mr. Khan said.
The company's user-research team will study how people respond
to the feature, and consider whether to recommend additions such as
the ability to protect locked messages from deletion. It will also
track whether disappearing messages lead to a change in user
behavior on the platform, Mr. Khan said.
Write to Katie Deighton at katie.deighton@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 06, 2020 15:04 ET (20:04 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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