The culture of disappearing photos and videos started out from Snapchat, and shortly after, trickled down to Instagram Stories. It proved to be a great way to share videos with your friends and fans. It is a way for your fans and friends to interact with you in a sort of “live” fashion. 24 hours later the videos go missing, so if any of them missed the photo or video, they missed that part of your life.
You can now have that on WhatsApp too, sort of. The “View Once” feature was supposedly released (beta) on Android devices late in June 2021 and was just released for the iOS platform very recently. But it does not have the 24 hours lifespan like Instagram Stories or Snapchat. Rather, you can choose to send videos and photos to your friends and get it automatically deleted once the photo or video is viewed.
While it is a new feature for WhatsApp, it is not necessarily a new feature in the world of messengers. Facebook Messenger and Instagram Direct Messaging have been allowing users to send one-time-use videos or photos to their friends for some time now. Similar to both of these platforms too then, you can see whether or not the recipient has already opened the media file you sent over.
Last week we mentioned that WhatsApp is planning to allow users to send videos and photos in higher quality than ever before. That feature is yet to be available on WhatsApp Beta too currently. At the same time, allowing higher resolution photos or videos to be sent via WhatsApp could also mean more storage woes thanks to WhatsApp. Disappearing media within WhatsApp chats could be one solution to that. The “View Once” feature does not prevent your recipients from doing getting a screenshot of the message though.
On that subject, “View Once” could also be seen as a privacy protection feature. Once viewed, the media gets deleted from your chats, reflected on both ends. That also means that the media will not be available anywhere else, except for the source device and, if your recipient decide to capture screen, on his/her device.
There is a bunch of updates that are lined up for WhatsApp. While platforms like Telegram and Signal are gaining in popularity when it comes to web based messaging apps, WhatsApp still holds the biggest market share and mind share in the current climate. As we have discovered in our research and discussion with a security expert as well WhatsApp, despite its ties to Facebook, is one of the most secure messenger apps in the industry.
