Facebook is currently considering making an “unsend” feature available to all users. This is following the revelation messages from Mark Zuckerberg were being secretly deleted from people’s inboxes.
The social media giant said it was working on the change and expects it to be ready in several months.
It comes after the company admitted it has been removing executives’ messages from the inboxes of various people for several years – an option not currently available to its 2.2 billion other users.
“We will now be making a broader delete message feature available,” a Facebook spokesperson told the TechCrunch website. “This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives’ messages.
“We should have done this sooner — and we’re sorry that we did not.”
Facebook said it began erasing the messages of Mr Zuckerberg and a few other top executives in 2014 after computer hackers obtained and released emails from Sony Pictures executives.
The Sony messages included disparaging remarks about movie stars and other people in the entertainment industry.
Meanwhile, Facebook’s chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg said the company should have conducted an audit after learning that political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user data nearly three years ago.
She told NBC’s Today show that at the time, Facebook received legal assurances that the company had deleted the improperly obtained information.
“What we didn’t do is the next step of an audit and we’re trying to that now,” she said.
