Disappearing messages are currently one of the hottest features on many messengers. WhatsApp has only recently expanded this function. But do you even use the feature? Or are messages with a self-destruct timer a disruptive factor that you have to accept? We’re not exactly sure, so we’re passing these questions on to the NextPit community today
The privacy in the digital world is my – not quite so humble – opinion the most critical point in our interaction with technology. After all, we live in the information age and spread our lives online in texts, which can then be found on servers that are far away. I don’t know about you, but the idea can cause a lot of frustration for an average person like me.
I don’t mean to say that I understand how complicated encryption works. But if information about me is stored somewhere, no matter how good the encryption is, someday someone will be able to crack it.
Disappearing messages: humanizing our chats?
The solution to our concerns is simple. How about if we simply recreate our memory in real life in the virtual world? It’s pretty easy to do in the digital world: set a timer for messages – and once the timer expires, they’ll go away. With all factual evidence gone, our communications retain the same sense of uncertainty and privacy that we have in real-world interactions.
The truth is, however, that communication in the real world is more difficult than one might think at first glance: any type of communication that is not recorded in some form exists in the minds of those who take part in it. In a way, your word goes against mine, which makes our discussions safer.
Snapchat owes its success in large part to the fact that it is committed to making news disappear. / © Primakov / Shutterstock
But despite all our intellectual size, we are still very limited. Communication can be challenging when the only reference is our memory. After all, we are bombarded with information more than ever and everything is seeking our attention. Today we are expected to remember more details with greater accuracy than ever before.
Personally, I now rely so much on the ability to record texts that if someone sends me a message with an expiration date, it is very likely that I will have forgotten it after three minutes. This, in turn, can lead to great confusion in subsequent conversations. But that also happens in “real” life. So I would say that disappearing news is humanizing our virtual life in a certain way, with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with it.
On the one hand, it’s pleasantly convenient when we always have access to news. That allows us to get in contact with more and more people. On the other hand, there is the security of disappearing messages that protect our privacy.
But that was not all. It is obvious that there are several ways of doing this, too, which sometimes work better and sometimes worse. The task now is to find the right balance. After all, different platforms also have different target groups. Some companies use disappearing messages for critical information. The aim here is to ensure that the risk of any information leaking out is minimized.
At the same time, other users might want to use the platform to entrust particularly sensitive secrets to friends and family members. Still others are simply happy to know that no one can record their messages. How does it look for you? What are your reasons for self-erasing messages?
But don’t doubts still remain when we reduce such a complex topic to a few simple questions? Will such approaches actually humanize our communication in digital worlds? Or are we just kidding ourselves with cheap solutions like self-erasing messages because they give us a false sense of security?
In an ideal world, I don’t need to bring up that point, damn it. But there are enough articles on the net that deal with how to bypass the supposed security of disappearing messages. So there is unquestionably the danger that our privacy, our right to be forgotten, and all of the things I discussed above have no real value.
Does knowing that the person on the other side of the screen could potentially be recording things ruin the purpose of disappearing messages?
Of course, there are many aspects that we did not address in this survey; the subject is obviously more complicated than it first appears. There are also serious security and surveillance issues that I have not discussed in the text. But I thought that we might be able to discuss this better in the comments and I am therefore looking forward to your contributions.