Facebook Suddenly Offers Secret 'Unsend' Feature After Silently Pulling Out Zuckerberg's Messages Right From People's Inboxes
People would usually expect that nobody would just pull out messages from their private inboxes, but Facebook has made an exception for the benefit of its executives. Old Facebook messages from Mark Zuckerberg has disappeared from inboxes, chat logs and even the supposedly complete Download Your Information tool.
Meddling with people's inboxes may be seen as an invasion of someone's private online affairs, but for Facebook, the privacy of Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives seems to weigh more, allegedly in the interest of corporate security.
"After Sony Pictures' emails were hacked in 2014 we made a number of changes to protect our executives' communications," a Facebook representative explained to Tech Crunch in a statement.
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"These included limiting the retention period for Mark's messages in Messenger. We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages," the spokesperson from the social media platform added.
At least three sources have reportedly confirmed that their inboxes no longer hold the old Facebook messages sent by Zuckerberg, and the replies from the CEO have, in some cases, simply disappeared from Messenger chat logs.
Using Facebook's own Download Your Information tool no longer yields these messages, either, as it looks like Facebook has deleted them for all practical purposes. The owners of these inboxes have never been notified by the platform, either, according to The Verge.
Facebook has never publicly disclosed that they were doing these for Zuckerberg and other executives in the company until now, when sources have come forward to reveal that the platform has been silently removing all traces of its founder's old messages from 2014 and earlier.
Unlike Zuckerberg and some other Facebook officials, Facebook users do not have the ability to delete their own messages from their own inbox, much less erasing the ones they already sent to other people.
With Facebook caught in the act of retracting messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg, the company is perhaps trying to assuage users with an announcement for an unusual new feature, according to Tech Crunch's Josh Constine.
According to Facebook, they are telling news websites that they are planning to launch an "unsend" feature, one which will be available not just to Zuckerberg but also to all other Facebook users.
This previously "secret message feature" is supposedly coming out in several months as Facebook is now apparently just getting started on making their inbox-altering exercise an actual product on the platform.
Also, Facebook is claiming that they will stop "unsending" any more of Zuckerberg's messages until the feature is out for everyone, perhaps to try to be fair about it.
"We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer — and have their messages automatically deleted," a Facebook spokesperson claimed.
"We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives' messages. We should have done this sooner — and we're sorry that we did not," the representative offered as an apology.
