Replies: 56 comments 46 replies
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These features should be as obnoxious to use as possible, because over-use will be amazingly annoying and encourage the development of homeservers and clients that completely ignore them. |
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Annoying for who? I can't think of a possible reason to make the feature hard to use. Some people want full conversation history, some want only the last X minutes/hours/days/weeks/months. Or they just want certain conversations (rooms) to have this option. Some do it for privacy, others to keep their homeserver tidy with no maintenance. As for implementation, I'd follow Signal and have a configurable self-destruct timer in room settings with a timer icon under each message. |
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Thing is that you cannot ever rely on a feature like that to do anything since it would be incredibly easy to change your server to not care about the setting, and the more they're used the more likely it's going to be for there to be a popular client/server fork that doesn't follow it, because most other people doesn't want random messages just disappearing out of the blue. So if you rely on something like this for privacy, you're bound to get bitten in the ass from the false sense of security. If anything what would be more useful is to use encrypted rooms and for clients to have a button for destroying the keys it has for a room, and then both parties could destroy the keys to read old messages that way. |
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An idea: allow Synapse home servers to set an option whether to delete redacted/self-destructed messages or not and visibly show information about this in every user's info. |
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Implement self-destructing message at first we can via bot with admin rights, that will delete (redact) all messages older than specific time. And if this will be popular - implement in Matrix client interface. And additional server option for homeserver owners in Synapse 'Remove deleted (redacted) message from homeserver database' with warning 'Acts only on current homeserver database, deleted messages may kept on other homeservers with disabled this option'. |
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It can't be done in a matrix client, because what if your client is offline then your messages wouldn't be removed. Bot would be fine as that'd be online all the time |
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Here is issue about Matrix room history purge bot turt2live/matrix-wishlist#81 |
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Depends on when you want to destroy the messages. For example telegram deletes them after a user had read the message. So this would be more of an "destroy x time after read". This behaviour could also not be implemented in a bot, because the bot would need to redact device/user specific messages. |
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I'm afraid, disappearing messages in Matrix would be quite a bit more complicated or less user friendly then in Signal. Signal deletes messages only locally on the phones while Matrix redaction works on the server. Thus the Signal behaviour of Delete message on A's phone x minutes after A has read it won't work. We could only do Delete message in the root x minutes after everyone has read it. And even that breaks completely, if there is an inactive user in the room or any user has disabled Read notifications. So we would probably need not one, but two timers to be set. One for every user has read the message and one (longer) fallback, where the message gets deleted no matter who has read it. |
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there's a proposal for this now at matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#1763 |
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New proposal is matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals#2228 |
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and an other one here, merged into develop : matrix-org/synapse#6409 |
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that's not a proposal, that's the implementation ;P |
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even better then 😃 |
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So it released in Synapse 1.7.0rc1, now waiting implementation in Riot UI? |
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Hey, I as a journalist really need this features to start using Element. As you may now in some country we and our sources face heavy risks (sometime deaths) if some repressive state caught us with message history. I understand that this features is hard to implement and that we cannot guaranteed that every messages will be deleted on every server / client etc. But what matter the most for my security is that the message is delete on my device that I trust. In the meantime, would a bot be a solution? Would it be possible to pay someone to implement this? We really need this. |
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Elements should support self-destructing messages as a feature. This is a common and essential functionality in many other messaging apps like signal and telegram. Self-destructing messages can enhance privacy and security by automatically deleting messages after a predefined duration or trigger. This can reduce the risk of data breaches, unauthorized access, or forensic recovery of sensitive or personal information. While this feature may not guarantee complete protection in every situation, it can mitigate more than 99% of potential threats. This feature is urgently needed for matrix users. Please prioritize adding this feature as soon as possible. |
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How about, for direct messaging between two people where |
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matrix-org/matrix-viewer#47 brings this issue up to me again as Matrix is making it too easy to access past history of rooms going as far as to publishing members-only readable histories on a webpage (granted not indexed by search engines) for anyone who knows the link and thus potentially contributing towards social cooling and fighting against the right to make the mistakes. |
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Any news / Things that can be done to push the making of this feature??? |
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I fully understand that self destructing messages are not a silver bullet, but I am totally in support of their addition. There are many cases where the attacker isn't a l33t hacker but just someone who picks up your phone that was left unlocked playing a youtube video and scrolls through your messages. Being able to ensure that only 1 week, or 1 day, or 1 hour of recent messages exist on the participants devices (or at least on your own device) is a valuable privacy feature. |
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This is an important feature for companies to improve their GDPR compliance. In GDPR, storing personal data without time limit is against the data minimisation and storage limitation principle. https://gdpr.algolia.com/gdpr-article-5 When companies offer chat via matrix amongst employees – possibly on company-provided managed phones –, the problem of non-trusted servers does not apply. It is a closed environment. Imagine:
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For several of those things you'd rather want message lifetimes, so that you can also do things such as only showing the invitation to the common break shortly before it begins (even though you are not on Matrix then), and not show it after it has started to those who didn't read it before. |
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Yet another reason why there should be possibility for self-destructing messages is combating climate change as many of us have old messages that we won't miss and that are using up storage somewhere as they keep cumulating and that storage uses electricity which may be unclean or taking electricity that could be used by something else. |
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I also think this is a really important feature. Even if there are some clients and servers who don't follow these rules, in activist/political organizations it's common that everyone uses Element, the server is hosted by the organization and everyone is well-behaved until the day of a police raid where they confiscate devices. At that point, it's great if most old messages are deleted from devices and servers. |
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still no client offering this to match the low retention on synapse server...sigh |
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Its 2025 now and still no option for messages to auto delete :/ should be standard in any private messaging app in my opinion. |
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Yes, please have this added - as part of the more comprehensive proposal #712. |
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As previously stated, this feature is becoming more and more important as time passes. Under the current administration on USA it's possible that having critiqued them means you will not be able to cross their borders. There is also growing hostility towards LGBT* community everywhere with "gay propaganda" laws, so in addition to the USA, people in some EU countries such as Bulgaria and Hungary might also benefit from the feature. I am reminded of the game Secret Hitler and its message of facists having to win only once, while for privacy activists it's a constant struggle with same bad ideas constantly being brought up anew (such as chat control and it's client side message scanning or passport fingerprint registry for crime investigations). |
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强烈建议实现自定义消息自毁的功能, 这个太重要了。 如果手机丢失,或者被他人拿走, 重要的信息就会被偷窃了。 |
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This is obviously not a foolproof security measure because clients can be modified to not redact previously sent messages for example, but a recent thread has given some examples on why this is a useful feature nonetheless.
https://whispersystems.org/blog/disappearing-messages/
https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/automatically-disappearing-messages/473/18
https://whispersystems.discoursehosting.net/t/automatically-disappearing-messages/473/10
https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/comments/5706th/disappearing_messages_for_signal/d8ojhg2/
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