Facebook Says Pokes Messages are saved for Two Days; Messages Get Expired When Encryption Key is deleted

Facebook announced yesterday that the Facebook Poke messages get self deleted after some seconds. The officials of the company claimed yesterday that these Pokes are encrypted and then Facebook deletes the encryption keys two daysw after these messages are being read.

The officials of the company further informed the sources of the media that the complete back ups of these messages are deleted after 90 days and after this a Poke becomes totally inaccessible.

It is the general practice which is being observed by the company that the company stores all the things which we share on Facebook till the time we delete our account on the Facebook.

But as far as the Poke messages are concerned, they have some different nature. These messages are normally considered as the urgent messages and they can not be stored and normally they have the urgent nature and they are also categorized as the informal messages.

A day before yesterday, when Facebook launched the Poke messages app for iOS, it received some criticism from different analysts of the market. But most of the users of the Facebook welcomed this app for iOS.

The main competitor of this service is the Snapchat app. According to some sources of the market, the Facebook introduced this Poke app for iOS after inspiring from the Snapchat app. This Snapchat app has clearly mentioned in its privacy policy that they tend to save the messages for a short period and when the messages are transmitted or delivered, they instantly delete these messages. The exact words from the privacy policy of the Snapchat app are as under;

“When you send or receive messages using the Snapchat services, we temporarily process and store your images and video in order to provide our services… we attempt to delete mages as soon as possible after the message is transmitted”.

As far as the opinion of the Facebook is concerned, the company has included the following wordings in its Privacy policy;

“All Poke messages are stored in encrypted form and retained for two days after the last recipient views. The poke – a process that helps facilitate abuse reporting. After that period, a Poke’s encryption key is deleted. However, it may still be possible to recover that key from logs or backups. After a fixed time period, this key becomes inaccessible, rendering the content completely unreadable (unless it was copied for abuse reporting). Today, that fixed period can be up to 90 days, but we verify the stability of the Poke deletion system.”

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