Whatsapp’ Big Privacy Push: Users Can Now Select Who Can See Last Seen, About & Profile Photo

WhatsApp is rolling out new privacy settings that would allow users to hide their profile photos, last seen, and About info from specific people in their contacts lists.

This is now available on both iPhone and Android devices.

What’s New?

Prior to this there were three privacy options for your profile photo, last seen, and About info.

One could either share those with everyone, or only their contacts, or no one at all. 

There is now a fourth option called “My contacts except…” which is also available for Status privacy.

How It Works

With this users can show their profile photo, last seen, and About info to people in their address book except those they exclude.

They can create a list of contacts that won’t be able to see their profile photo, status, etc., while keeping this info visible to the rest of the contacts, essentially working as a blacklist.

How To Use

It should be noted that if you turn off your ‘last seen’ so nobody can see it, you won’t be able to see others’ either. 

To try out the new controls, navigate to WhatsApp’s Settings > Account > Privacy menu.

WhatsApp also announced a few group calling features.

Group Call Features

Users can now mute others during a group call while also being able to message specific people.

A banner will also be shown when someone joins a group call offscreen, making it easier to see when more people join large calls.

Chat Transfer Between iOS And Android

Less than a week ago the app introduced the ability to transfer chat history from Android to iPhone, one that was long requested for.

Earlier, users could only transfer chats the other way (from iPhone to Android).

How It Works

The transfer process only works on new or factory reset iPhones and utilises Apple’s existing Move to iOS app for Android.

Once a user clicks on WhatsApp data as an option in the app, the data will be packaged in a format compatible with iOS.

Apple or WhatsApp will not see any of this data and it will remain encrypted.

Once the data is transferred and a user launches WhatsApp on their iPhone for the first time, it will detect the data there, decrypt it, and all of the previous chats will be restored.

Edit Button In The Works

About 2 weeks ago it emerged that WhatsApp was testing out a feature which will add an edit button and allow users to edit their messages after sending them.

It reportedly started working on the edit feature five years ago but scrapped it soon after.

How It Appears

A screenshot shared by Wabetainfo shows an edit option when a sent message is selected.

It would appear alongside the existing Info and Copy options that appear once the user long-presses a text message.

Users will be able to use the feature by selecting Edit from the pop-up menu after long-pressing the text message.