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Comment by uph | Hacker News Reader

"Disappearing messages are a way for you and your friends to keep your message history tidy. They are a collaborative feature for conversations where all participants want to automate minimalist data hygiene, not for situations where your contact is your adversary — after all, if someone who receives a disappearing message really wants a record of it, they can always use another camera to take a photo of the screen before the message disappears."

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This should be strictly a recipient controlled option, only affecting the recipient's view then. Anything else is still a misleading UX for the sender, and assumes people read the fine print. They don't.

If you want a recipient controlled option that already exists as you can set the number of messages you want to save before old ones are deleted.

Not deleting the messages from the senders view just to teach users a lesson about security doesn't make any sense and would just confuse people. Showing a warning about it still being possible to take a picture of the phone with another camera would make more sense but seems a bit silly.

It's very simple. In the same feature as pruning old messages by count, add by time. Allow this on a per-conversation level. Done.

This is horrible logic and ignores important opt-in/opt-out dynamics which are critical to our conception of privacy. By enabling "self-destruct," (or "disappear") the sender merely forces the recipient to "opt-in" and take affirmative action in order to archive the message (i.e. Screenshot). This is how telephone conversations generally work -- no recording unless one party takes action to tape it. Despite this ability to tape, we certainly still consider telephone to be more "secure" due to this archival distinction. Very often it is the advice of lawyers to avoid putting something in writing, and communicate it in person or over the phone instead. Disappearing messages brings us closer to this desirable ephermerality.

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