Whatsapp has had a tough year from a security standpoint and has suffered losses in the size of its user base as a result.

To their credit, the company has been working hard to make their product more secure.

Recently they took another powerful step in that direction with the introduction of disappearing messages. These allow you to set a time delay that will cause your conversations with other users to have a pre-defined shelf life of either 24 hours or 90 days at your option.

This builds on the disappearing messages feature the company introduced last year which allowed users or admins to set messages to disappear after seven days.

The company had this to say about the recent changes:

“When enabled, all new one-on-one chats you or another person start will be set to disappear at your chosen duration, and we’ve added a new option when creating a group chat that lets you turn it on for groups you create.  This new feature is optional and does not change or delete any of your existing chats.

For people who choose to switch on default disappearing messages, we will display a message in your chats that tells people this is the default you’ve chosen.

This makes clear it’s nothing personal – it’s a choice you’ve made about how you want to communicate with everyone on WhatsApp moving forward.

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.”

These are good changes and they do indeed serve to mitigate the risks of Whatsapp users.  Kudos to the company for continuing to improve their product and make it more secure.