WhatsApp Adds New Privacy Features For Last Seen, Profile Photo, And More

WhatsApp is rolling out a new privacy feature to beta testers, giving people the ability to more granularly control what kind of data people can see in their profile. The change, which was first detailed a couple of months ago, is now rolling out to some of those who are on the WhatsApp TestFlight beta.

That change will allow people to set whether people can see their profile photo, last seen status, and the about section.

When setting the feature up, people will be able to allow everyone, just their contacts, nobody, or all their contacts except specific ones, according to a report by WABetaInfo. There are, however, some points to note about the current implementation.

  • People that have an outdated version of WhatsApp or they don’t have the feature enabled still cannot see your information if you exclude them;
  • When you exclude some contacts from seeing your last seen, you won’t be able to see their last seen as well, so what happens when you set your privacy settings for last seen to “Nobody;”
  • There might be possible to see the last seen of excluded contacts, but it’s a bug.

There is currently no telling when this new privacy feature will be made available to everyone, but WhatsApp is normally pretty good at moving features from beta to the App Store fairly quickly. Hopefully that’s the case here, too.

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