telegram.org/blog/unsend-pr
Gaslighting as a first class feature:
"Now you can “unsend” messages you have received as well, and there is no time limit. You can also delete any private chat entirely from both your and the other person's device with just two taps."
That's a bit odd.
Conversation
To be fair there are some positive uses for that, but being able to delete someone else's record of a conversation within the app is also very weird and easily abused. Send someone an abusive message and delete it. Delete someone's message and claim they never sent it. And so on.
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I think you should be able to delete them up until the point that the other person has seen them. I don't think it needs a specific time limit. The other people could take a screenshot of it immediately if it was something sensitive or embarrassing. It's too late at that point.
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My main concern is someone can repeatedly send abusive messages and then go back through the history and delete the evidence. If the victim hasn't through to take screenshots or back it up, they have no proof it occurred. I'm serious about "Gaslighting as a first class feature".
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You can also use this to delete evidence of agreements and decisions with legal implications. I have personal experience with this, where the ability for the other person to delete message history after turning on me would have been really bad. I may need that evidence later.
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You shouldn't be using Telegram for anything legal in the first place, always conduct agreements via email
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I think you're misunderstanding. I'm not talking about formal legal agreements between people, but rather real-time discussions that end up having legal implications and can be used as proof. Text messages are very often used as evidence in legal cases.
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It doesn't matter what you intend to be a formal agreement or not. Your discussions with people have legal implications and can be used to prove things. Someone being able to go through your past conversation logs and strategically make deletions can really end up hurting you.