Most WhatsApp users are likely familiar with hiding statuses from the eyes of prying and nosey family, but soon you’ll be able to hide your profile photo and more.
Among efforts to enhance its privacy and security features, the Meta-owned instant messager recently announced that it will soon allow users to select which contacts will be able to see a user’s Profile Photo, About, and Last Seen status information within the app.
The feature becomes useful for users who would want to have an image up as a profile photo or last seen but would not like all their contacts to be able to view it, like your nosey aunt or mother- in-law, for example.
The WhatsApp announcement sees the platform borrowing already-existing privacy settings available for statuses. Now, these kinds of controls will be accessible to most of the information users share on the platform.
To adjust settings and control who sees your information, here’s how the privacy settings can be set:
Everyone: Your last seen profile photo, about, or status will be available to all WhatsApp users.
My Contacts: Your last seen profile photo, about, or status will be available to your contacts from your address book only.
My Contacts Except…: Your last seen profile photo, about, or status will be available to your contacts from your address book, except those you exclude.
Nobody: Your last seen profile photo, about, or status won’t be available to anyone.
The new privacy features will also build off other existing settings, such as read receipts, which, if turned off, removes the double blue tick from the sent and received messages, indicating that a text has been read on both sides of the conversation.
WhatsApp’s competitor instant messaging app, Telegram, introduced similar features to its for years. Despite this, the new security enhancements from WhatsApp make privacy settings more customisable than Telegram and thus allows users to have more control over what they share with who.
The new features from WhatsApp come amid the company’s push toward enhancing community engagement.
As part of other current features, WhatsApp users can expect the expansion of group chat sizes to 512 members, up to 2GB of file transfers, and reactions to messages, which recently become usable on the platform.
WhatsApp’s file-sharing size has also increased from 100MB to 2GB, aimed to enhance collaboration among small businesses and school groups.
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