Your Facebook Poke Will Self Destruct In Five Seconds

Facebook has a new Snapchat knockoff that just hit iTunes. No Android version as of yet exists, but I’m sure it’s on the way.

Facebook Poke is set to be your app for photo and video messaging but will anybody want to engage in Snapchat weirdness on Facebook? And does this mean Facebook owns your ill-advised “not safe for work” pics?

The biggest difference between Poke and Snapchat is that Snapchat’s user interface (UI) is silly and playful, according to Gizmodo.

Poke’s messages will disappear after one, three, five or ten seconds, a setting you decide as you send them; but maybe not from Facebook itself, as the Terms of Service state that Facebook owns all intellectual property posted on it. And someone may even pull a screen capture and save it in jpeg or png format to view at any time.

Some Apple product users are wary of trusting Poke, feeling that if they send something they won’t be proud of when they’re sober, or have to apologize for at work, Mark Zuckerberg will have a copy of their Poke message, violating their privacy. Snapchat will remain the app of choice for conspiracy theorists (who, by the way, produced such an uproar over Intagram’s change in their Terms of Use that Instagram ended up reverting to the original to prevent a mass exodus of celebrity and fan accounts).

Results are yet to be seen as to the privacy of the Poke application, though Snapchat has confirmed:

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

As Techcrunch states, Facebook has attempted to assure the users of Poke:

“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 are working to significantly reduce that period over the next several weeks as we verify the stability of the Poke deletion system.”

The wary could take some time to be convinced, as the storage period is still unconfirmed by any kind of evidence.