In early April, a scandalous Bloomberg report revealed that Facebook had “secretly” deleted some messages from Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives through the Messenger app. At the time, it was known that the social network would include a “delete function” that would allow users to delete their sent messages, perhaps in response to user criticism of the company’s poor privacy practices.
According to a new TechCrunch report, this “don’t send” button could be very close to its official release. The technological medium had access to screenshots showing that Facebook Messenger has begun to run the first tests of the feature, shared by Jane Manchung Wong.
Facebook Messenger is finally working on "Unsend Message" in the app for everyone!
Tip @Techmeme pic.twitter.com/5OtQrmyID3
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 12, 2018
So far, when a user deletes a message sent via Facebook Messenger, it is only deleted from his inbox so that the recipient can still see the content. The Unsend button allows users to unsubscribe from this message so that third parties cannot access some of their personal information in their profile.
As with the undo feature in Gmail when we send an email, Wong said that the new Facebook feature allows deleting the message only after a certain period of time. We expect it to take a few minutes, but we don’t have any details on this aspect.
Facebook has confirmed this feature to the press, saying that they will always focus on testing their products and features internally before they are publicly deployed to ensure maximum usability. In any case, we are getting progressively closer to this feature.