Gliph is already a great way to send private and secure text messages. Starting today, we’re introducing the ability to permanently delete individual Gliph messages.
Deletion works according to these rules:
- In any Gliph messaging conversation, either party may permanently delete individual messages at any time.
- Deleted messages are permanently removed from Gliph.
- There will be no indicators that a deleted message once existed.
Gliph now supports message deletion in its mobile web application and in the iPhone application (Gliph for iOS version 1.21+). For now, Android users should visit the mobile web app to delete messages.
Deleting Messages on Mobile Web
We’ve moved the View Gliph functionality to the center of the title bar. This made room for a new edit button on the top right of the conversation view. Tap that to reveal checkboxes that allow you to select multiple messages for deletion. Here’s a screenshot:
Deleting Messages on the iPhone App
Message deletion is a little bit different in the Gliph iPhone application. In the conversation view, swipe any message from left to right to reveal a delete button. Here’s a screenshot:
Our Thinking On Message Deletion
It used to be that removing a connection with another person’s gliph was the only way to delete all messages sent with another user. It was a pretty clumsy way to edit your conversations.
Messaging tools handle deletion in different ways. For example, iMessage will locally store your messages across your various Apple devices. Other clients, like GroupMe ‘remove’ messages and do not delete them for other participants in a conversation.
We considered some common reasons a person might want to remove a message, including “I didn’t mean to send that to you” and “I don’t want that text I sent from the bar at 4am last night in our conversation today.”
We also considered that some people might want a complete archive of conversations they have on Gliph. After all, Gliph’s data locker for Facet information is intended to serve as an option for permanent storage of personal data. Why not conversations too?
Ultimately, we felt that our goal of preserving privacy in communication trumped handling archiving abilities at this time. We pledged to revisit how we can support this and the broader concepts of data portability in the future.
We concluded that we wanted everyone to feel they can be as expressive as they want in private conversations on Gliph. We see controlling the content of your conversations as a way to provide freedom of communication.
We hope you dig message deletion and it leads to new life experiences and relationships with your connections. If you have any questions, feel free to reach us at support@gli.ph.