Seems fair to me -- some people do want some archive of their conversations but the option to limit the storage duration of those conversations. Secret chat is a heavily promoted feature -- it's not some hidden mode just because it's not the deafult.
Me and a bunch of other people met online and talked about programming, hacking, etc. All of us were teenagers at the time. One of the people, who I considered a good friend, turned out to be this guy:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-id...
They found the logs of our IRC conversations over a period of 5 years and found a bunch of incriminating stuff (just teenagers shooting the shit, trashing people, and talking about hacking and stuff)
It's unpleasant to know a bunch of people read your private stuff. TBH, the username is pretty similar
i downloaded all the history, put it into a markov chain library and now we have a bot that can generate random phrases (some, absurdly hilarious) based on our own conversations.
To the point that the major players mostly fail at doing it well enough to achieve a good UX.
WhatsApp doesn’t allow you to sync conversation history between devices, even though this is technically possible. It’s just hard, so they don’t do it. Instead, they require you to have a single device (e.g. your phone) acting as a secure conversation-history database, which other devices (e.g. your laptop) can then interact through WhatsApp “thin clients.”
iMessage manages to sync conversation history between devices while also being E2E-encrypted, but it’s the exception (and also unavailable to non-Apple users.)