Facebook Messenger is a little less permanent starting today.
The company has finally rolled out an unsend feature on its messaging service, which will let people delete messages they regret or sent too soon, assuming they don’t wait too long.
Users will have 10 minutes to remove a message not only on their own screen, but also on those of everyone who was on the message’s send list. There will, however, be a message alerting the other person or people that a message was removed.
The unsend function will only work on mobile versions of the Messenger app. Desktop users do not have the ability to remove messages from their PCs.
It’s a feature that has been a long time coming for users. Facebook started hinting at the addition since April, when it became public that CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quietly using an early version of the feature.
The feature reportedly was developed after the Sony Corp. Data hack in 2014, which exposed a trove of sensitive internal communications. Facebook created a capability that let executives expunge their app messages after a period of time.
The new function comes a little more than two years after Facebook began testing full encryption on the Messenger app with the “Secret Conversations” feature. Those messages can only be read on one device of the person you’re talking with.