It’s easy to send a social media message typed in anger or drunkenness, but now a once secret feature on Facebook lets anyone delete them after sending – providing they are quick off the mark.
Months ago, Facebook admitted a back-end feature to protect executive messages allowed bosses at the social media network to delete their sent messages.
Once they were rumbled, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised not to activate the feature until the app was generally available to all users.
Well, now that seems to have happened.
Zuckerberg’s magic eraser allowed him to delete any message he had ever sent, but the new app has a 10 minute window and in group conversations, the deleted text is replaced by another message explaining the sender had removed the comment.
Facebook was unclear if executives now had to delete messages within the same window as other users or if they still have their super capabilities.
Facebook Messenger also has a message delete function in ‘secret conversations’, where users can set an auto-delete timer on their communications.
WhatsApp, another Facebook messaging service, also has the same function.
New security features from Google
Meanwhile, Google has launched new security features that check online for users to see if their passwords are compromised.
Password Checkup is a Chrome browser extension that warns if security credentials on a web site are compromised
Cross Account Protection is similar but warns if a Google account is compromised by a hacker, even if the security breach is on a web site outside of Google using a Google account for access.
Google’s Kurt Thomas, a security and anti-abuse research scientist said: “Your privacy and security is of the utmost importance. With technologies like Password Checkup and Cross Account Protection, we’re continuing to improve the security of our users across the internet, not just on Google – and we’ll never stop improving our defences to keep you safe online.
“Google never learns your username or password even through it collects the data.”
Google added that developers were seeking to co-operate with other technology companies to make cross account protection easy to implement.
Rival browser Firefox introduced a similar feature last year
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