Facebook set to notify users if you screenshot a chat

People screenshot chats for all sorts of reasons. Maybe you want to remember a joke, or perhaps you want to get a second opinion on something someone said.

Either way, it now looks like the days of the sneaky screenshot are over as people will now know if you’ve screenshotted a chat in Facebook Messenger thanks to a new update.

Posting on Facebook, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote: “New update for end-to-end encrypted Messenger chats so you get a notification if someone screenshots a disappearing message. We're also adding GIFs, stickers, and reactions to encrypted chats too.”

The post follows an update to Messenger that allows people to set their messages to disappear. The Facebook feature has already been rolled out in the USA and is due in Europe in the coming weeks, according to USA Today.

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To demonstrate the screenshot update, Zuckerberg shared a screenshot of a conversation between him and his wife Priscilla Chan.

In the picture, it shows the alert someone will get if one of the participants takes a snap of the conversation.

The chat also shows Chan using the disappearing messages feature, or vanish mode, which was updated last year to allow people to choose how much time their message appears before it’s deleted.

Demonstrating the feature, Zuckerberg sent a dad joke to Chan.

Zuckerberg wrote: “What does a baby supercomputer call their father? Data.”

An alert then appeared below the message which read: “Priscilla took a screenshot”.

“I see that screenshot,” Zuckerberg responded.

“Saving that one for later!” Chan replied.

The updates will also apply to Instagram, which is owned by parent company Meta.

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