Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen reports of WhatsApp developing a myriad of new features for privacy conscious users. Today the meta-owned messaging giant has announced three such privacy features – this will start rolling out to all users in the coming weeks. This includes the ability to silently exit groups, block screenshot capture for view one’s photos and WhatsApp and hide online status from the contacts of your choice.
In his latest blog post Mark Zuckerberg has announced a bunch of new features for WhatsApp. They’ll be rolled out in the coming days but most of these features are aimed at enhancing the privacy and security of WhatsApp conversations. In fact he actually said this in his Instagram story and that blog post he said that he wants to make these conversations on WhatsApp as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.
But how do all of these features really stack up? Do they really make a difference to your user experience well let’s find out? Let’s see.
Ability To Leave Group Silently
Now, all of us are on WhatsApp groups, not just family groups, even work groups and sometimes you end up leaving a group or you are removed from a group. Either way it’s an awkward situation where everyone on that group gets a notification about who has left the group or has been removed from the group. Later this month the new feature will allow you to leave a WhatsApp group silently. Apart from the admin of that group no one needs to know that you’ve exited the group.
Showing Online Status to Selective Contacts
This next feature in our list is quite a useful feature especially if you want to decide how to keep your online presence private. We’re now using WhatsApp all the time we’re getting notifications and messages on groups. What if you could decide who gets to see your online status. Maybe you only want your mom or someone special to know you’re online or maybe you don’t want your boss to know that you’re online. Or even someone randomly messaging you on WhatsApp.
These features will also be rolled out later this month and I think that would be quite a useful ones. Because, earlier you could decide who gets to see when you were last seen online and that could be someone from your contact list. It mean a bunch of people on your contact list or everyone in general. Now, it’s a lot more specific you can decide which particular person knows you online.
Block Screenshot Capture
This is a useful addition and of course we’ll see this later this month. If you’re trying to be sneaky and someone has sent you a message that is for private viewing and one-time viewing only. If you’re taking a screenshot of that, that is not cool. So, WhatsApp is actually adding a new screenshot blocking feature for view once messages. I think that can be very useful especially for a lot of us who are using the app and want to keep private conversations just private.
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