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Idk, I’m glad it doesn’t exist in iMessage. There’s enough other apps you can elect to use if you want such a feature, and you and the other party agree that yo

Idk, I’m glad it doesn’t exist in iMessage. There’s enough other apps you can elect to use if you want such a feature, and you and the other party agree that your threat model necessitates this. I’m already quite annoyed apple implemented unsend, and message edit. I’ve always disliked all these features since it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message.

thisislife2 2y ago
> it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message. Is it your message though? Doesn't the copyright belong to who wrote it (the sender)?
- kelnos 2y ago
  Yes, but I think GP's point is that it's unnerving that someone can give something to you, and then modify it without your consent. Sort of like how it's not cool that Amazon can sell you a Kindle book, and then silently update or even remove it without your consent. (Not the same thing, of course, but it's in the same family of weird.) One potential real-world issue is that a text message conversation could be used as evidence of domestic abuse or of general harassment or threats. If the perpetrator can edit the message history for both parties at will, that's a problem. In practice, of course, there are ways to solve this problem, like the device keeping around the history of edits (Signal does this, not sure if others do), and the app can also limit the reach of this sort of nefariousness by disabling the edit function after a certain amount of time.
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  By reading this message you agree to the following terms: (a) any thoughts or replies inspired by this message (“the message”) are exclusive property of the writer of the message (dullcrisp on Hacker News), (b) at any time, dullcrisp may revoke your license to read or reply to this message, (c) you agree to remove this message from your browser’s cache and expunge any other copies made of this message at dullcrisp’s request or within 24 hours of receipt, whichever comes first.
- scintill76 2y ago
  It's your copy of the message. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if a copyright owner gives you a copy of their work, the law doesn't entitle them to take it back or rewrite it. A license agreement might, but nobody writes or signs those to cover text messages.
  - speerer 2y ago
    I think a more useful way to analyze this is that a message, when it is sent to you, is not serving the purpose of a copyright work. So copyright should not really be the lens through which we analyze this.
    - almosthere 2y ago
      Copyright isn't the entire point though. If someone says: I'm going to kill your husband in a text. Your husband is murdered, and you take your phone to the police, is that text still going to be there?
- jeroenhd 2y ago
  I don't think copyright matters. These messages are a conversation between you and someone else. I don't see why only one party should have control over them. I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps. Disappearing messages can be great for privacy and I applaud them for that use case, but they can also easily be used to hide evidence of abuse and other nasty stuff right from the victim's phone. I'd suggest a good implementation of this feature should come with a setting to disable disappearing messages by default (a setting which should be off). With the setting on, the sender should see the option to send disappearing messages be disabled, and the other party should be able to turn them back on on a per-chat basis. The setting should probably also allow tracking of edits/deleted messages. That way, people are in control and can know what to expect from their messengers. You won't find yourself lacking evidence of blackmail after the fact because your chat history unexpectedly deleted itself. Furthermore, I think that most messaging within apps that provide this feature puts too much trust in the remote device. If you enable this feature, apps pretend that it's a sure and done deal, when in reality there are myriad ways of extracting messages before they're deleted. As someone who bridges most of their chat apps through a (private) Matrix server, I've toyed with the idea of disabling the delete functionality to keep control on my side of the conversation. So far, I haven't needed it, but having the ability to do so if necessary gives a certain amount of comfort.
  - wang_li 2y ago
    > I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps. It depends on where you are. In the US plenty of states require consent from all parties to a conversation to record it. The only function of this rule is to allow people to lie about what the conversation was about, as there is no law that prevents a party to the conversation writing it down and sharing it to the public. And that's exactly what I think about disappearing messages. The only function of this is to be able to lie about the message. I'm not interested in having a system where someone can set their message retention to 5 minutes and then send a bunch of abusive messages to me. Or some sort of phishing message. If they choose to add this to iMessage they should also include an option that automatically rejects all disappearing messages and reply to the sender indicating that their message was rejected. Or optionally, if I could set my phone to ignore the expiration time and retain the message forever. It's my phone and I'm paying for the phone service. It's up to me how my device is used, not some third party. If they don't like my terms, they should choose not to involve me. Not everything needs to be the equivalent of a midnight whisper in a dark alley.
pmontra 2y ago
In a different messenger: people enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp not because of a threat model but because they don't want their phone to run out of space. The problem here is that messages are deleted for everybody in the chat and I saw people complaining about that in group chats. They would like that messages are deleted only for the people that enabled disappearing messages on their phones. Sometimes the creator of the group realized that everybody was an admin, set only themselves as admin and disabled disappearing messages. I don't own an iPhone so I don't know for sure if old messages clog iPhones too but the article hints that this is the case. Maybe Apple is happy to sell new phones with more storage to people that run out of space. Maybe iMessage is a tiny storage eater, maybe not. Photos, videos, vocal messages are on the phone forever too?
- genewitch 2y ago
  > don't want their phone to run out of space Has this excuse ever worked?
  - pmontra 2y ago
    Sometimes, for groups with only messages of truly ephemeral value. If nobody values much what's written there (memes, where and when to meet, good morning, etc) then everybody is happy to see pictures and videos disappear and storage recovered.
    - genewitch 2y ago
      I was talking with a fellow Matrix server admin and comparing our on disk DB sizes, theirs was 430GB and mine is ~7.3GB, total media size of 14GB or so. They said the MatrixHQ room bloated the database by 1100GB. however, on the client side, you don't cache all that stuff, only what you can see; you have to scroll up and wait for the server to fetch it and show it to you if you wanna see older stuff. You can use the search, too, and that's "relatively" quick, and will scroll back to the correct spot. But in larger rooms with more media, clicking the result to get the context is hit-or-miss.
- mos_6502 2y ago
stavros 2y ago
I really don't understand this "I don't want to have a choice" mindset that I only see here for stuff relating to Apple. Why would you want something to be missing for everyone, when the people who don't want it could just not use it?
- jisnsm 2y ago
  Because even if you don’t want to use a feature, others will use it with you.
  - stavros 2y ago
    But you can still turn it off.
    - jisnsm 2y ago
      Others will text you and insist that you keep the feature on for the conversation.
      - stavros 2y ago
        If someone will absolutely not accept talking without disappearing messages, they probably won't go "well iMessage doesn't have the feature so I might as well talk without it", they'd ask that you switch over to an app that does have it.
        jisnsm 2y ago
        I disagree, because I’ve lived it and I know how it goes. It’s the same as unsending messages - you can ask people not to do it, but if the option exists, they will do it anyway. I’d rather that options I don’t like don’t exist.
        DrillShopper 2y ago
        There are several people I know who have messaged me on Discord while I'm working/busy/sleeping and then deleted the message after it didn't get a response "fast enough" for them. However, the messages stay in the phone notifications, so I'll reply to them. Lost a friend over that, actually. "Well you should have respected my wish to not read those messages" "THEN DON'T SEND THEM"
RataNova 2y ago
But I don't think disappearing messages are about putting control in someone else's hands; they're about giving both parties the option to communicate more privately when needed.
freedomben 2y ago
From what I've been told as an Android user repeatedly over the years, anything-but-iMessage is a (often-times insurmountable) burden on many iphone users who only want to use one app for all the things, and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage. As ridiculous as it may sound, my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past because iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones. So presumedly, if Apple doesn't implement it then there's a large group of people with no access to this feature since they are unable or unwilling to use a different app. It would make sense to me that is part of the motivation for the advocacy.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage iMessage isn't an app. It's just the Messages app, and the reason it's that app is because it's the SMS app. There's zero effort to using Messages. It just works, and it just works to communicate with everyone because it will always fall back to SMS. Every single other app, the receiver has to have installed first. > As ridiculous as it may sound, my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past because iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones It's unfortunate but not ridiculous. SMS is bad for sharing media and missing a lot of features that make for better conversation. And group texts in SMS are just kind of broken in a lot of different ways, nothing to do with iMessage.
  - radlad 2y ago
    > SMS is bad for sharing media and missing a lot of features that make for better conversation. And group texts in SMS are just kind of broken in a lot of different ways, nothing to do with iMessage. RCS solves these issues.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      That's true. RCS has only been present on iPhones in the past few months. Are people even remotely aware? Have they noticed a difference? I wonder if it might takes years for people to regain trust with carrier-provided messages with group texts...
eddieroger 2y ago
> in control of what should be your message The message isn't yours anymore after you sent it, it's the other party's now. When you mail someone a letter, it's up to them what to do with it. Why would this be different? If you want to retain control over something, don't give it away on a medium you can't control.
- zerocrates 2y ago
  That's what the parent post means. Unsend and message edit are methods for the sender maintaining control, which is what they don't like.
  - radicality 2y ago
    Yep, exactly what I meant, the moment I send someone else a message, from that point it it basically duplicates itself and I keep my copy (and if I feel like it I can delete my local copy of it), and they get their own. So I shouldn't be able to 'take back' or edit what I now logically think of as their copy of the message!

thisislife2 2y ago

> it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message. Is it your message though? Doesn't the copyright belong to who wrote it (the sender)?

kelnos 2y ago
Yes, but I think GP's point is that it's unnerving that someone can give something to you, and then modify it without your consent. Sort of like how it's not cool that Amazon can sell you a Kindle book, and then silently update or even remove it without your consent. (Not the same thing, of course, but it's in the same family of weird.) One potential real-world issue is that a text message conversation could be used as evidence of domestic abuse or of general harassment or threats. If the perpetrator can edit the message history for both parties at will, that's a problem. In practice, of course, there are ways to solve this problem, like the device keeping around the history of edits (Signal does this, not sure if others do), and the app can also limit the reach of this sort of nefariousness by disabling the edit function after a certain amount of time.
dullcrisp 2y ago
By reading this message you agree to the following terms: (a) any thoughts or replies inspired by this message (“the message”) are exclusive property of the writer of the message (dullcrisp on Hacker News), (b) at any time, dullcrisp may revoke your license to read or reply to this message, (c) you agree to remove this message from your browser’s cache and expunge any other copies made of this message at dullcrisp’s request or within 24 hours of receipt, whichever comes first.
scintill76 2y ago
It's your copy of the message. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if a copyright owner gives you a copy of their work, the law doesn't entitle them to take it back or rewrite it. A license agreement might, but nobody writes or signs those to cover text messages.
- speerer 2y ago
  I think a more useful way to analyze this is that a message, when it is sent to you, is not serving the purpose of a copyright work. So copyright should not really be the lens through which we analyze this.
  - almosthere 2y ago
    Copyright isn't the entire point though. If someone says: I'm going to kill your husband in a text. Your husband is murdered, and you take your phone to the police, is that text still going to be there?
jeroenhd 2y ago
I don't think copyright matters. These messages are a conversation between you and someone else. I don't see why only one party should have control over them. I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps. Disappearing messages can be great for privacy and I applaud them for that use case, but they can also easily be used to hide evidence of abuse and other nasty stuff right from the victim's phone. I'd suggest a good implementation of this feature should come with a setting to disable disappearing messages by default (a setting which should be off). With the setting on, the sender should see the option to send disappearing messages be disabled, and the other party should be able to turn them back on on a per-chat basis. The setting should probably also allow tracking of edits/deleted messages. That way, people are in control and can know what to expect from their messengers. You won't find yourself lacking evidence of blackmail after the fact because your chat history unexpectedly deleted itself. Furthermore, I think that most messaging within apps that provide this feature puts too much trust in the remote device. If you enable this feature, apps pretend that it's a sure and done deal, when in reality there are myriad ways of extracting messages before they're deleted. As someone who bridges most of their chat apps through a (private) Matrix server, I've toyed with the idea of disabling the delete functionality to keep control on my side of the conversation. So far, I haven't needed it, but having the ability to do so if necessary gives a certain amount of comfort.
- wang_li 2y ago
  > I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps. It depends on where you are. In the US plenty of states require consent from all parties to a conversation to record it. The only function of this rule is to allow people to lie about what the conversation was about, as there is no law that prevents a party to the conversation writing it down and sharing it to the public. And that's exactly what I think about disappearing messages. The only function of this is to be able to lie about the message. I'm not interested in having a system where someone can set their message retention to 5 minutes and then send a bunch of abusive messages to me. Or some sort of phishing message. If they choose to add this to iMessage they should also include an option that automatically rejects all disappearing messages and reply to the sender indicating that their message was rejected. Or optionally, if I could set my phone to ignore the expiration time and retain the message forever. It's my phone and I'm paying for the phone service. It's up to me how my device is used, not some third party. If they don't like my terms, they should choose not to involve me. Not everything needs to be the equivalent of a midnight whisper in a dark alley.

pmontra 2y ago

In a different messenger: people enable disappearing messages in WhatsApp not because of a threat model but because they don't want their phone to run out of space. The problem here is that messages are deleted for everybody in the chat and I saw people complaining about that in group chats. They would like that messages are deleted only for the people that enabled disappearing messages on their phones. Sometimes the creator of the group realized that everybody was an admin, set only themselves as admin and disabled disappearing messages. I don't own an iPhone so I don't know for sure if old messages clog iPhones too but the article hints that this is the case. Maybe Apple is happy to sell new phones with more storage to people that run out of space. Maybe iMessage is a tiny storage eater, maybe not. Photos, videos, vocal messages are on the phone forever too?

genewitch 2y ago
> don't want their phone to run out of space Has this excuse ever worked?
- pmontra 2y ago
  Sometimes, for groups with only messages of truly ephemeral value. If nobody values much what's written there (memes, where and when to meet, good morning, etc) then everybody is happy to see pictures and videos disappear and storage recovered.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    I was talking with a fellow Matrix server admin and comparing our on disk DB sizes, theirs was 430GB and mine is ~7.3GB, total media size of 14GB or so. They said the MatrixHQ room bloated the database by 1100GB. however, on the client side, you don't cache all that stuff, only what you can see; you have to scroll up and wait for the server to fetch it and show it to you if you wanna see older stuff. You can use the search, too, and that's "relatively" quick, and will scroll back to the correct spot. But in larger rooms with more media, clicking the result to get the context is hit-or-miss.
mos_6502 2y ago

stavros 2y ago

I really don't understand this "I don't want to have a choice" mindset that I only see here for stuff relating to Apple. Why would you want something to be missing for everyone, when the people who don't want it could just not use it?

jisnsm 2y ago
Because even if you don’t want to use a feature, others will use it with you.
- stavros 2y ago
  But you can still turn it off.
  - jisnsm 2y ago
    Others will text you and insist that you keep the feature on for the conversation.
    - stavros 2y ago
      If someone will absolutely not accept talking without disappearing messages, they probably won't go "well iMessage doesn't have the feature so I might as well talk without it", they'd ask that you switch over to an app that does have it.
      - jisnsm 2y ago
        I disagree, because I’ve lived it and I know how it goes. It’s the same as unsending messages - you can ask people not to do it, but if the option exists, they will do it anyway. I’d rather that options I don’t like don’t exist.
        DrillShopper 2y ago
        There are several people I know who have messaged me on Discord while I'm working/busy/sleeping and then deleted the message after it didn't get a response "fast enough" for them. However, the messages stay in the phone notifications, so I'll reply to them. Lost a friend over that, actually. "Well you should have respected my wish to not read those messages" "THEN DON'T SEND THEM"

RataNova 2y ago

But I don't think disappearing messages are about putting control in someone else's hands; they're about giving both parties the option to communicate more privately when needed.

freedomben 2y ago

From what I've been told as an Android user repeatedly over the years, anything-but-iMessage is a (often-times insurmountable) burden on many iphone users who only want to use one app for all the things, and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage. As ridiculous as it may sound, my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past because iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones. So presumedly, if Apple doesn't implement it then there's a large group of people with no access to this feature since they are unable or unwilling to use a different app. It would make sense to me that is part of the motivation for the advocacy.

crazygringo 2y ago
> and for whatever reasons that one app must be iMessage iMessage isn't an app. It's just the Messages app, and the reason it's that app is because it's the SMS app. There's zero effort to using Messages. It just works, and it just works to communicate with everyone because it will always fall back to SMS. Every single other app, the receiver has to have installed first. > As ridiculous as it may sound, my kids have actually been left out of social groups in the past because iMessage doesn't (or didn't?) work very well with Android phones It's unfortunate but not ridiculous. SMS is bad for sharing media and missing a lot of features that make for better conversation. And group texts in SMS are just kind of broken in a lot of different ways, nothing to do with iMessage.
- radlad 2y ago
  > SMS is bad for sharing media and missing a lot of features that make for better conversation. And group texts in SMS are just kind of broken in a lot of different ways, nothing to do with iMessage. RCS solves these issues.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    That's true. RCS has only been present on iPhones in the past few months. Are people even remotely aware? Have they noticed a difference? I wonder if it might takes years for people to regain trust with carrier-provided messages with group texts...

eddieroger 2y ago

> in control of what should be your message The message isn't yours anymore after you sent it, it's the other party's now. When you mail someone a letter, it's up to them what to do with it. Why would this be different? If you want to retain control over something, don't give it away on a medium you can't control.

zerocrates 2y ago
That's what the parent post means. Unsend and message edit are methods for the sender maintaining control, which is what they don't like.
- radicality 2y ago
  Yep, exactly what I meant, the moment I send someone else a message, from that point it it basically duplicates itself and I keep my copy (and if I feel like it I can delete my local copy of it), and they get their own. So I shouldn't be able to 'take back' or edit what I now logically think of as their copy of the message!