Messenger is still part of the most used social networks in the world and its secret conversation offer helps to retain users.
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A secret conversation in messenger of Facebook, now Meta, is part of the functionalities introduced in this social network during the last decade and which ensured its evolution and adaptation to the needs of the new times.
The growing concern for the privacy of a population that increasingly uses social media chats to communicate in all public and private areas of their lives is clearly reflected in this function made available since 2017.
In a social network that is still present in the group of the 4 social networks with the most users worldwide, the privacy that seems to be guaranteed by Messenger’s secret conversation suggests that the thousands of users of this network can communicate without fear of being monitored.
But what exactly is a secret conversation on a social network and to what extent can it be effectively secret?
What is a secret conversation in Messenger?
In this Messenger feature, Meta guarantees users that they can have an exclusive conversation with someone from their contacts and that no one will intercept or see what they communicate, not even Messenger itself.
This is because the conversation will be end-to-end encrypted, which means that, from the time it starts with a user until it arrives at the recipient or vice versa, no one other than these two communicators will have access to its decryption.
The only people able to see and access this type of conversation are the interlocutors involved in it, whether it is text, image, video or sound. But of course there is a potential weakness in this secret Messenger conversation. And it just happens that some of the people involved in the conversation decide to photograph the screen during it and later share that print-screen with third parties.
Another advantage of Messenger’s secret conversation is the possibility for its user to define the time during which his messages will be available in the conversation.
He can set a kind of timer that will make his messages in this encrypted chat available forever or just for a few seconds, by defining the moment in which they should be deleted.
How to trigger this mode
The first thing you’ll have to do is open your app on your phone. Messenger secret conversations are only available on the mobile app for iOS and Android and are not possible to do through their website.
Once the application is open, click on the pencil icon in the upper right corner. When doing so, in that same place, an icon with a padlock will appear as if that padlock were disabled. Tap it and activate it by dragging it to the right.
Now, all you have to do is write your message and choose whether or not to set its duration time before it is permanently deleted.
It will be easy to identify conversations that are secret in your list of conversations – that is, if you haven’t asked them to disappear – since visually an icon with a padlock associated with each one of them will appear.
Remember that these conversations will only be visible on the device they were created on and on the device the recipient uses to open the conversation. This is because for the encryption to be effective, this communication will assign a decryption key to each device involved and through no other device will be able to access it.
