Facebook founder and humanoid CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg has issued an apparent warning to Facebook Messenger users, telling them not to capture their conversations unless they want the other person to know about their capture. ‘screen.
Zuckerberg, who is battling declining Facebook users and a massive shareholder sell-off, posted an update to his personal profile detailing the changes.
“New update for end-to-end encrypted Messenger chats,” he wrote.
“You receive a notification if someone captures a message that disappears”.
So if someone sends you something you want to share, remember that the other person will be able to see that you copied that message. A similar feature is also in place in Instagram messaging.
However, this feature is only part of Facebook’s new encrypted Messenger chat service, which enables conversations with disappearing messages. The new feature is designed to compete with encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Telegram that people are increasingly turning to in response to the massive surveillance of personal data held by companies like Meta.
WhatsApp, which Meta also owns, has been using end-to-end encrypted messaging for several years now, but the service only debuted on Facebook in the past few weeks.
The new feature can be found in a conversation’s settings in the Facebook Messenger app. Messages can be set to erase after a period of up to six hours and, according to Meta, cannot be read by anyone, even the company itself.
They use end-to-end encryption, sending private message keys with the message that only the receiving device can use to unlock the message. This type of technology has been used in cryptography for decades, but has become increasingly relevant due to the current climate of big data and big technology.
While the minor update might be a welcome change for some, Zuckerberg and Facebook investors surely have bigger issues at stake. Figures revealed last week by Meta showed that, for the first time, Facebook’s daily users plummeted — and plummeted quite significantly.
Facebook lost around half a million daily users in the last quarter of 2021, dropping from 1.93 billion to 1.929 billion. That’s still a huge chunk of the world’s population, however, the report spooked investors, leading to a $320 billion sale of Facebook shares.
Some predict that with the metaverse investment that Meta is pursuing, competition from TikTok, and ongoing regulatory issues in regions like Europe, not to mention the revelations about the mental health impacts of its products that have surfaced the last year, the sun may well be on Meta.
We are far from that, of course, but the wind has certainly been removed from the sails of the Meta ships.
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