Whatsapp is an integral part of everyday life for most Germans. But the fact that everyone uses Messenger can also be a disadvantage. With new functions you now want to tame too much curiosity.
It’s a dilemma: Hardly any app is as easy to set up as Whatsapp. But the fact that really everyone can use the messenger also has disadvantages. Especially if the contact list not only includes friends, but also bosses, craftsmen or ex-partners. And initially have unlimited access to the public aspects of the profile. Whatsapp has now responded with a new update. And strengthens privacy in several ways.
The new functions are slowly arriving at the users. Although you should always keep the app up to date anyway, that doesn’t mean that they will appear automatically with the installation of the latest update. Whatsapp activates them on the server side and distributes them to users step by step. Experience has shown that all users should be able to enjoy the new settings in the next few days.
Select more specifically
One of the biggest barriers to privacy so far has been online status. Even if you hide when you were last online and deactivate the read receipt with a blue tick (here you can find out how to do that): If you are currently online at this moment, you cannot hide it from anyone saved in your own contact list . That is now changing. The online status can now not only be hidden from all users. In addition, Whatsapp even allows you to keep it secret from individual contacts – while the others can continue to see it. Contacts can be removed from the list or added at any time.
When it came to implementation, Whatsapp was clearly based on the “last seen” feature, where this option was introduced a few months ago. Until recently, everyone could see if and when they were online. Critics used this to create Whatsapp user profiles to draw attention to the problem.
Quiet exit
Also new is the option to leave group chats without the entire chat being informed. So far, each individual participant has received a notification when someone gets out. With the new option, this general message is omitted. But you can’t escape completely unnoticed: The group administrators will also be informed in the new version.
Trial period for more private chats
The two functions had already appeared in the beta version for Android smartphones last week, WhatsApp has now implemented them quite quickly and made them available to other users as well. Another new test function is still a long time coming: Whatsapp has been working on upgrading the function for displaying photos once. So far, the view lock can be bypassed simply by taking a screenshot of the image. At least in the Android beta, this is no longer possible: the screenshot function is simply deactivated while displaying one-off photos.
The new measures are part of a larger effort by the parent company Meta to establish the messenger as particularly privacy-friendly. CEO Mark Zuckerberg already announced that the chats should be as private as a real-world conversation. But that shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that Meta doesn’t want to learn anything about its users. You can find out why the large amount of information about the conversations, the so-called metadata, is almost more valuable than the content itself.
Quelle: Whatsapp, Techcrunch
