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.

Telegram’s been taken out of the Apple App Store because of ‘inappropriate content’

Telegram, a messaging app that was one of the first to introduce end-to-end encryption, has been taken out of the Apple App Store for “inappropriate content.” What kind of content we can’t say but as Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov tweets, “We were alerted by Apple that inappropriate content was made available to our users and both apps were taken off the App Store. Once we have protections in place we expect the apps to be back on the App Store.”

There is no word yet when the app will be back but it was taken down perhaps in violation of some of iOS guidelines that say there needs to be filters for objectionable material, mechanisms to report these, and the ability to block users from the service. There’s a possibility that some questionable content made it through the filters Telegram has in place. The app has been criticized in the past for the secretive nature of its messages for being the “app of choice” for terrorists.

Source: The Verge