‘Drunk text’ your ex on Facebook Messenger? Now you can delete missives within 10 minutes

Facebook on Tuesday added a Messenger feature for anyone who has fired off a comment they regretted -- a way to take it back. Messenger users will now have a 10-minute window after sending a message to undo it, leaving behind a note telling everyone in a conversation that the remark was removed, according to the leading online social network. "Have you ever accidentally sent a message to the wrong group of friends, mistyped something, or simply wanted to remove a message in a chat?" Facebook asked rhetorically.

"You're not the only one! Starting today, we are launching a feature where you can easily remove your message on Messenger." Facebook owns the mobile messaging application used by more than a billion people.

Early last year it was revealed that Facebook co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was apparently able to remove his sent messages, which caused pressure to make the feature available to all. The freshly added feature will let people tap on a message shown in a Messenger conversation then select a "Remove for Everyone" option, which will only be available for 10 minutes from when it was sent.

The remove feature will be available on mobile devices powered by the latest versions of Apple or Android software, according to Facebook.

Meanwhile, a study claims our privacy on Facebook and Twitter may be at risk even if you have never been on social media or have deleted your account, a study suggests. Individual choice has long been considered a bedrock principle of online privacy, said scientists from the University of Vermont in the US and the University of Adelaide in Australia. However, the study shows that if a person leaves a social media platform -- or never joined -- the online posts and words of their friends still provide about 95 per cent of the "potential predictive accuracy," even without any of that person's data.

Published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, the study gathered more than thirty million public posts on Twitter from 13,905 users. With this data, the researchers showed that information within the Twitter messages from eight or nine of a person's contacts make it possible to predict that person's later tweets as accurately as if they were looking directly at that person's own Twitter feed.