Legal challenge seeks to stop ministers sending disappearing messages
Ministers could be stopped from using self-destructing messages to conduct government business, following a legal challenge supported by an alliance of transparency campaigners and university archivists.
WhatsApp recently introduced the option for users to make messages permanently disappear for both the sender and the recipient after seven days. Its privacy-focussed rival, Signal, used by many Conservative MPs, has had a similar function for some time.
There are growing concerns that politicians and special advisers could be using such features to avoid accountability. Lawyers are now gearing up to bring a judicial review against the use of automatically disappearing messages, on the basis that using such functions makes it impossible to carry out the required legal checks about whether a message should be archived for posterity.
Source: Legal challenge seeks to stop ministers sending disappearing messages | Law | The Guardian
