> it puts someone else (the other party), in control of what should be your message.
Is it your message though? Doesn't the copyright belong to who wrote it (the sender)?
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I don't think copyright matters. These messages are a conversation between you and someone else. I don't see why only one party should have control over them. I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps.
Disappearing messages can be great for privacy and I applaud them for that use case, but they can also easily be used to hide evidence of abuse and other nasty stuff right from the victim's phone.
I'd suggest a good implementation of this feature should come with a setting to disable disappearing messages by default (a setting which should be off). With the setting on, the sender should see the option to send disappearing messages be disabled, and the other party should be able to turn them back on on a per-chat basis. The setting should probably also allow tracking of edits/deleted messages. That way, people are in control and can know what to expect from their messengers. You won't find yourself lacking evidence of blackmail after the fact because your chat history unexpectedly deleted itself.
Furthermore, I think that most messaging within apps that provide this feature puts too much trust in the remote device. If you enable this feature, apps pretend that it's a sure and done deal, when in reality there are myriad ways of extracting messages before they're deleted.
As someone who bridges most of their chat apps through a (private) Matrix server, I've toyed with the idea of disabling the delete functionality to keep control on my side of the conversation. So far, I haven't needed it, but having the ability to do so if necessary gives a certain amount of comfort.
> I have the legal right to record a conversation I play a significant role in, so I don't see why I shouldn't be allowed to do the same over messaging apps.
It depends on where you are. In the US plenty of states require consent from all parties to a conversation to record it. The only function of this rule is to allow people to lie about what the conversation was about, as there is no law that prevents a party to the conversation writing it down and sharing it to the public.
And that's exactly what I think about disappearing messages. The only function of this is to be able to lie about the message. I'm not interested in having a system where someone can set their message retention to 5 minutes and then send a bunch of abusive messages to me. Or some sort of phishing message. If they choose to add this to iMessage they should also include an option that automatically rejects all disappearing messages and reply to the sender indicating that their message was rejected. Or optionally, if I could set my phone to ignore the expiration time and retain the message forever. It's my phone and I'm paying for the phone service. It's up to me how my device is used, not some third party. If they don't like my terms, they should choose not to involve me.
Not everything needs to be the equivalent of a midnight whisper in a dark alley.
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It's your copy of the message. I'm not a lawyer, but I think if a copyright owner gives you a copy of their work, the law doesn't entitle them to take it back or rewrite it. A license agreement might, but nobody writes or signs those to cover text messages.
I think a more useful way to analyze this is that a message, when it is sent to you, is not serving the purpose of a copyright work. So copyright should not really be the lens through which we analyze this.
Copyright isn't the entire point though. If someone says: I'm going to kill your husband in a text. Your husband is murdered, and you take your phone to the police, is that text still going to be there?
Yes, but I think GP's point is that it's unnerving that someone can give something to you, and then modify it without your consent. Sort of like how it's not cool that Amazon can sell you a Kindle book, and then silently update or even remove it without your consent. (Not the same thing, of course, but it's in the same family of weird.)
One potential real-world issue is that a text message conversation could be used as evidence of domestic abuse or of general harassment or threats. If the perpetrator can edit the message history for both parties at will, that's a problem.
In practice, of course, there are ways to solve this problem, like the device keeping around the history of edits (Signal does this, not sure if others do), and the app can also limit the reach of this sort of nefariousness by disabling the edit function after a certain amount of time.