Rakuten, Inc. CEO Hiroshi Mikitani and Viber CEO Talmon Marco pose for photos in 2014. (Photo : Getty Images/Chris McGrath)
Viber is increasing privacy capabilities as they now have a new feature dubbed Secret Messages. It follows Telegram's similar feature in an effort to increase the privacy of their users.
Telegram already allows users to set a secret chat with their friends and set a self-destruct timer for all of the messages. Viber now has a similar feature for photos and videos which happens to be somehow identical to Snapchat's main capabilities.
Viber users that send photos or videos with the secret messages feature can set a timer that will start when their friends view the media, Tech Crunch has learned. The app also allows users to delete a whole conversation that will erase it from both ends. Telegram allows this but only for individually selected messages.
Users who will use the secret messags feature can choose among the preset view time from 1 seconds up to 10 seconds in odd number increments. For videos, users can set it to be viewed just once and then it would disappear. There will still be a record that something was shared but it can also be deleted if the whole conversation is erased.
Viber is also waiving the fees for calls that are made from the United States and the travel banned countries. The app is already popular in other countries such as Ukraine, Belarus and Eastern Europe, Financial Tribune reported. Unfortunately, the Iranian market has slowed down its growth in the country because the government throttles the access because of their non-compliance with data privacy requests.
Besides Viber, there are other more secure channels of communication for smartphone users. Telegram is one popular alternative as well as Signal. Facebook's Messenger does have the secret converstation feature but it does not allow deleting of messages and media sent.
Viber users can update their app by going to the Google Play Store or the App Store. The new features work across all iOS and Android devices.
Learn more about the new feature below:
