Signal, the app that touts to be a privacy-focused Messaging app has added a new feature to its service, called ’Stories’, As the name suggests, it works exactly how Instagram Stories, Snapchat Stories and WhatsApp Status features work. Signal has also explained how the feature will work on its app.
With the introduction of the feature, users can customise how to post their stories, enabling them to maintain end-to-end encryption. Stories will automatically expire 24 hours after you share them, but one can always manually delete them earlier, says Signal. Apart from this, one can go to settings and then to “stories” and turn off the stories to maintain utmost privacy.
“The aim is to have the choice to turn off stories and not broadcast them to anyone who won’t know that you have opted out of seeing the updates”, says Signal. Signal is handling the Stories feature in a slightly different way, though. People who can view your story and you can view theirs, include:
- Everyone in your phone’s contact list who uses Signal
- Anyone who had a 1:1 conversation with in Signal (even without adding contact)
- Anyone whose message request has been accepted in Signal
Read More: WhatsApp vs Telegram vs Signal: Ultimate Comparison
Separately, one can also share the story with a smaller subset of people or groups and create their own custom format so they can keep track of who has viewed their stories. When you share a story with one of your pre-existing group chats, anyone in the group can see the story as well as other members’ comments and reactions to the story.
Moreover, one can see updates that other members share to the group story whether or not they have interacted with them directly outside of the group.