Zuckerberg announces WhatsApp's new ‘Keep In Chat’ feature

Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new feature on WhatsApp which will allow people in a chat having disappearing messages to save them when they need the most.

Called a ‘Sender Superpower’, the feature ‘Keep In Chat’ implies that with disappearing messages, conversations do not have to stick around forever just like in-person discussions.

WhatsApp says this extra layer of privacy will protect the messages from falling into the wrong hands. The feature is being launched so that the users can hang on to texts they need for later, with a special ‘superpower’ for the sender.

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The Meta-owned platform said that if the user sent a message, it is his/her choice whether the others in the chat can keep it for later. The sender will be notified when someone keeps a message, and the sender will have the ability to veto the decision.

If the user decides that the message can’t be kept by others and the decision is final, no one else can keep it and the message will be deleted when the timer expires. It means that the user has the final say on how messages sent are protected.

On the other hand, messages saved on WhatsApp will be noted with a bookmark icon and can be seen, organized by chat, in the Kept Messages folder. This feature will roll out globally over the next few weeks.

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This comes days after WhatsApp introduced an optional feature to make it easier for people to post their WhatsApp Status to their Facebook Story automatically if they want to do so. Sharing is turned off by default; you have to opt in to use it, and can disable it at any time you want to.