The well-known program WhatsApp said on Monday that it is expanding its options for managing your vanishing messages. You can now choose how long the messages will fade and enable vanishing messages by default for all new conversations.

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CNET’s Brett Pearce
Every one-on-one conversation that you or someone else initiates will be scheduled to end after the time period you specify—24 hours, seven days, or ninety days—once you activate the feature. Additionally, when you start a group chat in the app, you will have the option to enable vanishing messages.

WhatsApp, owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, claims that the functionality is optional and doesn’t change or remove any of your previous communications. However, WhatsApp will indicate in your conversations that this is the default setting you have selected when you have enabled vanishing messages.

You may enable fading messages for all new individual conversations by default by following these steps.

How to make WhatsApp messages automatically vanish

It seems to just take a few steps to enable default vanishing messages while using WhatsApp on an Android or iPhone device. After opening WhatsApp, go to Settings (found in the lower right corner of the screen), then Account, then Privacy, and lastly Default message timing, as per the app’s support page about vanishing messages. You may then choose how long you want to wait for messages to fade and enable vanishing messages.

WhatsApp emphasizes that you should only send vanishing messages to those you can trust. The person you’re speaking with may be able to forward, copy, save, or take a screenshot of the message before it expires, even if the app makes your communications disappear after a certain period of time.

In November 2020, WhatsApp launched vanishing messages. Originally, the function was limited to individual conversations, and the message would vanish after seven days. View Once, a feature introduced by WhatsApp earlier this year, makes images and videos disappear from a discussion once they have been viewed.

For further information, see how to move your Facebook posts and images to other platforms and how to clear your Facebook Messenger without erasing conversations. See how to completely erase your Facebook account and how to totally vanish from the internet if you want to remove more than just your conversation history.

See more about the top 12 undiscovered WhatsApp features you should be aware of.
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