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WhatsApp’s three new privacy features and how they work

The three news features include the ability to hide your online status, exit groups silently and block screenshots for ‘view once’ images

by Zubina Ahmed

August 11, 2022

Did you ever wonder how to not show up as ‘online’ on WhatsApp or leave a group silently? Now, this is quite possible.

Popular messaging platform, WhatsApp recently introduced three new privacy-related features. These include, the ability to hide your online status, exit WhatsApp groups silently, and block screenshots for ‘view once’ images.

The new features were announced by WhatsApp head Will Cathcart and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, August 9.

Three great new privacy features for @WhatsApp users coming soon: pic.twitter.com/SE9JhYSD0s

— Will Cathcart (@wcathcart) August 9, 2022

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.

WhatsApp Messenger is an internationally available freeware, cross-platform centralised instant messaging and voice-over-IP service owned by American company Meta Platforms.

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”.

According to statista, as of June 2022, WhatsApp has approximately two billion monthly active users, outranking WeChat at 1.2 billion users and Facebook Messenger at 988 million global users.