Already under fire for the alleged data breach of its users, Facebook has landed in more trouble amid reports that the social media giant has deleted CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s messages from his recipients’ inboxes.
Following the revelation, Facebook announced that it is now planning to make its “Unsend” feature available to all users in coming months.
“We will now be making a broader delete message feature available,” a Facebook spokesperson told the TechCrunch website adding that the platform will no longer be deleting messages from any of its executives.
Further detailing the new feature, the spokesperson said that the message will be sent through an encrypted version of Messenger which will be having the ability to set a timer and after the stipulated time, the messages will automatically be self-destructed.
According to an earlier Tech Crunch report on 6 April, “Three sources confirm that old Facebook messages they received from Zuckerberg have disappeared from their Facebook inboxes, while their own replies to him conspicuously remain.”
Facebook never publicly disclosed that there was an option to remove messages from users’ inboxes. This could be termed as “a breach of user-trust” as only a few top executives used this feature.
The social media giant said that it made a series of changes to protect the communication of its executives after computer hackers obtained and released emails from Sony Pictures executives in 2014.
Notedly, two other Facebook services already offer different versions of the Unsend option. WhatsApp offers users to delete messages after a stipulated amount of time while Instagram offers users with the ability to complete unsend a DM (Direct Message) provided the recipient has not read the message or its push notification.
