Signal has introduced a new feature on their app called Stories. The following blog link will explain how users can customize and post stories, while enabling them to maintain end-to-end encryption.
Important highlights:
Signal has opted for a broader way of handling the story viewing feature. Stories can be shared / viewed by:
- 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.
You can also choose to manually hide your stories from specific people.
Similarly, one can also share the story with a smaller subset of people or groups and create their own custom format to 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. One can see updates that other members share to the group story whether or not one has interacted with them directly outside of the group.
Stories will automatically expire 24 hours after being shared, but can also be deleted before this timeframe. To implement the same, one has to 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.
