The most popular mobile messenger app will now give you more time to delete your messages. You now have a little over two days (60 hours to be exact) to delete that embarrassing message you sent to your friends or if you accidentally sent a message to the wrong person.
To delete a message on WhatsApp, please make sure you tap on the message you want to delete, hold it, and then click on the "Delete" icon in the upper right corner. At this point, if your message is not older than 60 hours, you will have the following options:
- Delete for Everyone - the message is deleted on both ends, and hopefully, nobody will be able to see that message anymore.
- Delete for Me - while the person you sent the message to will be able to see your message on his conversation thread, it will not appear on yours.
- Cancel - no action is taken with regard to the selected message.
It's not completely foolproof though, first because WhatsApp warns that deleting for everyone does not mean that recipients will not be able to see that the message was deleted. Second, there is an additional condition for this procedure to work properly: all recipients must be running the most recent version of WhatsApp.
This seems to be quite a useful feature that will place WhatsApp once again in front of other competitor apps like Apple's iMessage, where this option is lacking, Facebook Messenger (you have 10 minutes) or Signal (30 minutes). In contrast with that, there are other options like Telegram that can unsend (delete) anything at any time.
In any case, we welcome all features that give users more control over their online privacy. The right to delete your stuff is one of the most fundamental ones.