Taking screengrabs of disappearing messages on Messenger? The sender will soon get an alert

Gone are the days when you could freely take screen grabs of disappearing messages on Facebook's Messenger app. Soon, the sender will get an alert as soon as the receiver takes a screenshot of the conversation.

To mark Data Privacy Day on Friday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that the Messenger team is working on a new update that will ensure end-to-end encryption of the chats.

He confirmed the news with a screenshot of his conversation with philanthropist-wife Priscilla Chan. The alert read, "Priscilla took a screenshot."


"New update for end-to-end encrypted Messenger chats so you get a notification if someone screenshots a disappearing message," he wrote on Facebook.

The billionaire also informed that Messenger will have new GIFs, stickers, and reactions to encrypted chats.

The post was liked by over 411K people and shared nearly 160K times. While some users were thrilled to see the new updates, some joked about Facebook being a 'snitch'.

According to WABetaInfo, a portal that updates news about WhatsApp, the update may soon be seen in the instant-messaging platform. The disappearing messages feature was made available to all WhatsApp users last month.


WhatsApp also gave more options to users to control their disappearing messages.

Users can choose the option to turn on disappearing messages by default for all new chats. Two durations for disappearing messages were also added to the existing option of seven days - 24 hours and 90 days.

Meanwhile, the company is also working on a new chat feature that will give the control to the group admins to delete messages sent by other members without having to take their permission. This update will render more control in group chats weeding out any inappropriate texts.