NEW YORK, March 27 — Messaging app Telegram has added a robust “unsend” feature to the platform; now, users can delete any message within a private chat from the sender’s side as well as the recipient’s side.

Over the weekend, WhatsApp competitor Telegram announced that it has vamped up its “unsend” feature, extending users’ deleting power to any message within a private chat, whether they were the sender or not, at any time.

According to Telegram, the messages you choose to delete will “disappear for both you and the other person — without leaving a trace.”

Since the feature debuted two years ago, users could only unsend messages that they sent to a chat within 48 hours of delivery. Now, it doesn’t matter who sent the message nor does it matter at what time it was sent.

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To protect user privacy even further, Telegram also introduced a way to limit how people can interact with messages of yours that have been forwarded. This new Anonymous Forwarding feature, when enabled, disassociates your account from a forwarded message. Instead, there will only be “an unclickable name in the ‘from’ field.”

Company founder Pavel Durov explained the new privacy features in the following statement:

“An old message you already forgot about can be taken out of context and used against you decades later. A hasty text you sent to a girlfriend in school can come haunt you in 2030 when you decide to run for mayor. We have to admit: Despite all of our progress in encryption and privacy, we have very little actual control of our data. We can’t go back in time and erase things for other people.” — AFP-Relaxnews

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