WhatsApp still working on making View Once chats actually disappear for all

Meta's efforts to stop people repeatedly viewing WhatsApp’s so-called View Once messages – photos, videos, and voice recordings that disappear from chats after a recipient sees them – so far remain incomplete. An interim fix deployed to stop people keeping hold of View Once data has been defeated in less than a week by white- …

[Yorick Hunt]

Meta? Privacy?

Please refrain from using those two words in the same paragraph, let alone in the same sentence - unless you precede the latter with "lack of" or "abuse of."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Meta? Privacy?

Since WhatApp isn't really deleting the message from it's servers, this "feature" will always be a fraud until they do.

[weirdbeardmt]

Disappearing privacy

Not familiar with “view once” in WhatsApp but sounds analogous to “disappearing messages” in group chats.

The blurb for this is “for more privacy and storage…”

I wonder if anyone actually thought that they were deleted as opposed to merely hidden.

[Dan 55]

Re: Disappearing privacy

I'm not sure how you could enforce view-once messages in a browser client. It'd probably be something horrible involving iframes and not allowing right-clicks and even then any fix would last as long as the first person took to hit the print screen key.

[doublelayer]

Re: Disappearing privacy

I know, I know. You would somehow ask for operating system providers to not allow users to use screenshots without first getting the approval of any application on screen, or maybe just any application at all. That's the only way they can try to do that and similar to anti-screenshot mechanisms they try to use on phones which only work because they can interfere with things they shouldn't be able to interfere with. Not that it would work either. It will always be relatively easy to copy something that appears in plain text on a screen, and they should give up on preventing that rather than try to make it impossible by imposing their control on everything else a computer can do.

[Sora2566]

Re: Disappearing privacy

And even then, nothing can stop me from just taking a photo of the screen.

[Dan 55]

Re: Disappearing privacy

Windows Hello with Copilot+ checking the laptop webcam to enforce only one person looking at the screen and no cameras or mobiles in sight.

You know it's coming.

[David Austin]

Re: Disappearing privacy

That - this disclosure doesn't change the threat profile; even if whatsapp disable the phone's screenshot option while a view once message is on screen, you can still just photograph the screen. this feature by default has to assume someone can copy the message by hook or by crook.

[Brad Ackerman]

Re: Disappearing privacy

It's useful for sending messages to someone you trust to not themselves disclose them; it makes sure that they don't remain on the recipient's device to be retrieved later by a third party. (Assuming that the messages to be disappeared were properly stored in the client, anyhow.)

Icon because it's the only way to be sure.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only "feature" I want in WhatsApp right now is the removal and incineration of the monstrosity known as MetaAI and all its associated crap and clutter.

[collinsl]

Easiest way to remove this from your phone is to long-press the icon, then from the menu that appears select "Uninstall"

[druck]

Unless it's a built-in app.

[Valeyard]

2nd phone

these aren't to be relied upon. if they can be viewed they can be photo'd or filmed with a secondary device anyway, no light hacking required

[MichaelGordon]

This sounds a lot like the way Exchange Calendar used to (still does?) implement private appointments; a flag on the appointment which the official client looked at. Use anything but the official client to access the Exchange server and it's trivial to see the details of private appointments. This is why I put private appointments in my public calendar described only as "Busy" and use a second calendar on my local disk to hold the actual details.

[Piro]

Yeah that one is great, I remember we had info screens with calendar information for meeting rooms and it would just blast out the private title of the meeting on the screen even though the user thought it was secret.

Hasty fixes implemented.

Also smells of "redactions" in PDFs where an extra layer of black is on top of the words, completely unaffecting the text entirely when highlighted. Classic.

[Irongut]

> he was also disappointed that after all this Meta still hadn't got in touch with Zengo, despite its bug bounty terms of service promising frequent communication on submissions.

Maybe Meta doesn't want to deal with Israelis while they are committing genocide? Maybe Meta doesn't want to pay war criminals during this time?

Or maybe that screenshot showing the time in Tel Aviv was just a bad mistake and we aren't talking about cryptobros from a country that is committing genocide at this moment?