New feature in Messenger. You’ll get a notification when someone takes a screenshot. But there is a condition

In November 2020, Facebook decided to take care of the privacy of users of its flagship messenger a little better by introducing an end-to-end encrypted conversation mode with disappearing messages. The function appeared in Messenger (and on Instagram) and allows you to send text, photos, recordings or emoticons that disappear after users read and leave the chat.

Disappearing message mode is useful when you don’t want content sent to friends to be saved in your conversation history and be available to both parties months later. However, the feature is not always effective. For example, when one of the conversation participants takes a screenshot.

Messenger will notify you about the screenshot

Now Facebook (actually the newly formed Meta conglomerate) has decided to add a new privacy feature in the messenger. When one of the interlocutors takes a screenshot of the content sent using Messenger, the other person will receive a notification about it. It will be displayed at all times under the last sent or received message. A similar notification will also be seen by the person who took the screenshot.

The introduction of the news was announced on Facebook by Mark Zuckerberg himself by uploading a screenshot, and the function should already work for all users. We checked, in fact, the function also works among Polish users.

It is worth noting, however, that the potential of the communicator’s ability to recognize screenshots could have been used a little better. It is a pity that it was not decided, for example, to completely block taking screenshots in encrypted mode (such as, for example, in Incognito Google Chrome mode). The notification option that a screenshot has been taken could then be entered in the standard conversation mode.

Messenger introduces notifications when a screenshot has been taken photo: screenshot from Messenger

By the way, the encrypted conversation mode also got some new features. The ability to send disappearing stickers and GIFs has been made available, and the option of adding reactions to disappearing messages has also been introduced. These elements were previously available on Messenger only in standard mode.