WhatsApp appears to be testing a new privacy feature that will limit who can see a user’s “Last Seen” status. The move will allow users to set the app up to share their status with all of the contacts while also preventing some of them from gaining access.
First reported by WABetaInfo, the new change will be a big privacy change for those who need more granular control over who can and cannot see the last time they were inside the app.
Several years ago WhatsApp has implemented 3 privacy settings: Last Seen, Profile Picture, About. These settings allow you to decide who can see those data when interacting with you on WhatsApp. To manage these privacy settings, WhatsApp has implemented 3 options: Everyone, My Contacts, Nobody.This means that, if you didn’t want a specific contact could see your last seen, you had to set the privacy setting of your last seen to “Nobody”. Today WhatsApp is finally working to introduce another option called “My contacts except…”, so you can finally enable your last seen back, and you can disable it for specific contacts!
While the feature is currently only available to those who are part of the WhatsApp TestFlight beta, it will hopefully only be a matter of time before it is rolled out to everyone. WhatsApp is a popular messaging app across iPhones and Android devices and it appears this new feature is also being tested over on the Google side of things, too.