Judge Delays SEC Settlement With Elon Musk Over Twitter Stock Disclosure Case 
GOP Lawmakers Probe Sam Altman and OpenAI Ahead of Potential IPO 
Broadcom Eyes $35 Billion AI Chip Financing Deal With Apollo and Blackstone 
US-China Trade Talks Sideline Chip Export Controls as Nvidia China Sales Draw Attention 
TikTok Nears $400 Million Settlement With Trump Administration Over Child Privacy Lawsuit 
Alibaba Stock Surges After Strong Q4 Earnings Boosted by AI and Cloud Growth 
Japan’s Top Banks to Gain Access to Anthropic’s Claude Mythos AI Model 
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to Join Trump’s China Visit Amid AI Chip Tensions 
FTC Antitrust Probe Targets Arm Holdings Over Chip Licensing Practices 
Cisco Restructures for AI Growth After Record Q3 Revenue 
Dell Stock Hits Record High After Trump Endorsement, AI Server Demand Fuels Rally 
Samsung Shares Slide as Labor Talks Intensify Ahead of Planned Strike 
OpenAI Finds No Evidence of User Data Breach in TanStack npm Supply-Chain Attack 
Anthropic Nears $30 Billion Funding Round at $900 Billion Valuation 
OpenAI-Microsoft Deal Sets $38 Billion Revenue-Sharing Cap Ahead of Potential IPO 
Applied Materials Forecasts Strong Q3 Revenue as AI Chip Demand Accelerates 
SpaceX Shareholders Approve 5-for-1 Stock Split Ahead of Potential IPO 
Before Facebook became Meta, the social media empire faced widespread backlash over policy changes earlier this year that raised concerns on how it handles user data and online privacy on WhatsApp. But Meta appears to be making up for that by introducing more privacy-focused features in the months that followed. Now, the company is expanding how the messaging app’s disappearing messages work.
Disappearing messages is one of the most-awaited WhatsApp features that became widely available this year to the app, which has two billion active users worldwide. And Meta has just made it even easier to use in an update announced on Monday.
The company confirmed in a blog post that WhatsApp users can now make disappearing messages a default setting for all new incoming chats. Before this update, users had to manually enable the function in every conversation.
In the sample images Meta provided, it appears that the app will get a new “Default message time” menu from the Privacy settings where users can agree to “start new chats with disappearing messages.” When the new feature is enabled, users will see a reminder on the upper portion of the conversation window that will tell them they have enabled the default timer for disappearing messages in new chats.
As part of this week’s update, Meta also added two new durations for the WhatsApp disappearing messages feature. Previously, users could only choose to make chats disappear in seven days. But Meta has now added the 24 hours and 90 days options. The options are still not as expansive as Signal’s, where users can choose between 30 seconds to 4 weeks or add a custom time, but it should still be a welcome change.
“We believe disappearing messages along with end-to-end encryption are two crucial features that define what it means to be a private messaging service today, and bring us one step closer to the feeling of an in-personal conversation,” Meta said in the blog post. However, not everyone is looking forward to this kind of update on WhatsApp.
UK’s National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) has voiced its concern that the improved disappearing messages function would be exploited by child abuse perpetrators. “This poorly thought out design decision will enable offenders to rapidly delete evidence of child abuse,” NSPCC head of child safety online policy Andy Burrows said (via the Guardian).
