Telegram will let you delete messages in your private chat history

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Telegram takes the ability to unsend messages a step further. An update to the service will let you delete any message in your private chat history—it doesn’t matter if you’re the sender or the recipient. It’ll also let you wipe out an entire conversation—either from your side or from both you and the person you’ve been talking to. It feels like an extreme step, but the company thinks it’s necessary for the current time that we live in. As mentioned in his public Telegram channel, founder Parel Durov says the potential misuse of old messages keeps getting worse, with something said many years ago being “taken out of context.” This feature is meant to give you “complete control” over your conversations.

As TechCrunch warns, though, this feature could be as harmful as it is helpful. Malicious users could just delete messages to create a skewed/bogus version of a conversation, or even wipe any evidence of any wrongdoing. Whoever deletes things first gets control of the chat history. You wouldn’t even get a notification. Durov acknowledged the “potential misuse” of the feature but they considered that it would ultimately be beneficial. At this point, we’re not sure how true that could be.