WhatsApp Announces More Upcoming Privacy Features

The newer privacy features include the ability to leave groups silently, choose who can see when you’re online and screenshot blocking for view once messages.

In many countries of the world, WhatsApp is synonymous with messaging. Really, each and every phone in these countries contain WhatsApp and most people make a daily use of it. WhatsApp for long has remained the number one app in app stores. Now with the launch of WhatsApp web not requiring any active smartphone connection, its usage has reached computers too.

The regular usage of any app means security and privacy of the users needs to be taken care of. To improve them is always a progressive effort which gets done over the time. Looks like the upcoming updates to WhatsApp takes that further.

In a blog post, WhatsApp has announced new privacy features for its chat client. Three main improvements have been announced. These improvements include the ability to leave groups silently, choose who can see when you’re online and screenshot blocking for view once messages.

Official Announcement

The official announcement and explanation for each of the features is as follows:

• Leave Groups Silently: We love our group chats but some are not forever. We’re making it possible to exit a group privately without making it a big deal to everyone. Now, instead of notifying the full group when you are leaving, only the admins will be notified. This feature will start to roll out to all users this month.
• Choose Who Can See When You’re Online: Seeing when friends or family are online helps us feel connected to one another, but we’ve all had times when we wanted to check our WhatsApp privately. For the moments you want to keep your online presence private, we’re introducing the ability to select who can and can’t see when you’re online. This will start rolling out to all users this month.
• Screenshot Blocking For View Once Messages: View Once is already an incredibly popular way to share photos or media that don’t need to have a permanent digital record. Now we’re enabling screenshot blocking for View Once messages for an added layer of protection. We’re testing this feature now and are excited to roll it out to users soon.

It also posted a short video on Twitter showing the same.

To take the point further, it explained the same in even simpler terms in the followup Tweets:

Honestly, these features are much welcomed. Hopefully the improvements in the privacy continues.

WhatsApp Announces More Upcoming Privacy Features