The three new privacy features in WhatsApp, how they can be operated

The three new privacy features in WhatsApp, how they can be operated

You can hide your online status, leave groups quietly, and prevent screenshots for “see once” photographs, among the three new capabilities.

Have you ever wondered how to exit a WhatsApp group quietly or avoid appearing “online”? Now, this is really likely.

Three new privacy-related features were recently added to the well-known messaging service WhatsApp. You can also secretly leave WhatsApp groups and prevent screenshots from being taken off ‘see once’ images.

On August 9, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, unveiled the new features.

While earlier users were able to only hide their ‘last seen’ status, the company is now allowing you to hide your ‘online’ indicator or choose whom you want to share the status with. You can either completely hide the last seen online status from everyone, only unknown numbers, specific contacts, or from nobody. The feature will add a new ‘who can see when I’m online’ option under the last seen settings, with two options – ‘everyone’ and ‘same as last seen.’

Secondly, users will be able to leave group chats silently, without WhatsApp showing a ‘person left the group’ alert on the chat. The app currently alerts all members of a group chat to someone leaving or being removed by default. With the new feature, WhatsApp will only notify the group admin about a user leaving the group.

Thirdly, the ‘view once’ messages allow users to send media files that are only viewable once. However, these still allowed people to take screenshots of the media file. Now, WhatsApp has added a screenshot blocking feature on ‘view once’ messages that will allow users to block people from taking screenshots of their images.

The American business Meta Platforms is the owner of WhatsApp Messenger, a freeware, cross-platform, centralized instant messaging and voice-over-IP service that is accessible worldwide.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to announce that this would help keep WhatsApp messaging “as private and secure as face-to-face conversations”.

Statista estimates that WhatsApp will have two billion monthly active users by June 2022, surpassing WeChat’s 1.2 billion users and Facebook Messenger’s 988 million global users.