Web Messaging - Clearing Local Storage

Web Messaging
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Hello,

We are implementing Web Messaging on our mobile app and website and one item that came up the other day was the length of the conversation history within the web messaging widget and how that might potentially persist for other users using the same phone to access the mobile app or a shared computer. A few use cases came up such as:
• An end user is using a public computer at a library and logs into our site. They start a conversation with an agent asking a question about their credit card. They get their question resolved and log out of their account and leave the computer. Then, another person comes along and uses the computer. Will they see the previous person’s chat history?
• 2 siblings use the same phone and both log into our app from their phone. Similar to above, if one sibling logs in chats with an agent, completes their conversation and logs out, and the other sibling logs in and initiates a chat, will they see their siblings conversation history?

I was doing some research on this topic and was able to pick out which “keys” in the local storage are holding the conversation history. It looks like _actmu is the key that is used in the local storage to store the conversation history. So when I try clearing the key out of local storage actually introduces another issue that looks like this:

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So then I figured I would clear all of the values, but this also does not solve for the scenario when an agent messages the customer back after the local storage has been cleared. When they try to send a message, they receive an error message and the delivery doesn't go through, which makes sense.

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All this to say: How do you best recommend we approach the topic of clearing out conversation history within the web messaging widget to solve for the use cases provided above? Would love some tips on how to do this without introducing additional errors.

Thanks!
Peter

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Hi :wave:
Thanks for raising this use-case, quite popular now with Async Messaging support. The "easy" solution would be for a brand to deploy Authenticated Web Messaging, so that upon sign-out from the brand's website, the session cannot be accessed by anyone else (regardless of what is stored in browser storage). This ensures the maximum level of privacy, and also allows for conversations to resume across any other device/browser upon sign-in.
For websites that don't want to enforce Authentication via sign-in, we are planning future improvement based on this idea: https://genesyscloud.ideas.aha.io/ideas/DXWMM-I-10. Depending on how we design this, we might not only clear relevant browser storage, but also operate on API, so that session cannot be used anymore (for maximum privacy), and possibly propagate to consumers downstream.
At the moment I don't see any further improvement, beyond what you already observed: those messaged tagged with delivery-failure will likely never be delivered, once you clear browser cache. Having said that: I do recommend to implemented Authenticated Web Messaging, which seems to me the natural and most elegant solution here.

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