First off, WhatsApp’s giving users more control over how others see them in the app, with the option to switch off online activity markers, or restrict those signals to certain users.
As shown here, you’ll soon be able to decide who can see when you’re online in the app – ‘Everyone’, ‘Contacts’, ‘My Contacts Except’ or ‘Nobody’.
That’ll provide more capacity to avoid unwanted interactions by hiding your active status, which could be of significant value for users who want to go about their interactions in their own time and space.
WhatsApp’s also adding a new option to leave groups silently, so you can skip out of a group chat without alerting all group members.
As you can see, group admins will still know you’ve left the chat, but there won’t be a ‘John Doe has left the discussion’ notification for all users in the thread.
In addition to this, WhatsApp is also extending the time window for deleting your messages from your chats.
And finally, WhatsApp’s also rolling 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.”
That could facilitate even more private sharing on WhatsApp, which may lead to more questionable material being shared. If that’s what people want – though that specific aspect has also been the focus of various authorities, in various regions, who have called on Meta to enable a level of messaging access to authorities, in order to avoid its apps being used for illegal activity, which is currently shielded by its privacy measures.
Recently, the UK National Cyber Security Center published a research paper that proposed a new automated scanning process for WhatsApp, and other messaging tools, which would better facilitate the detection of illegal exchanges, while still maintaining privacy for users. The European Union has also proposed new legislation that would put more onus on Meta itself to detect and report any such activity within its platforms.
Thus far, Meta has resisted all calls to add in ‘back door’ access, or anything like it, arguing that the trade-off between all users’ privacy, and catching out the small percentage of criminal activity, is simply too great to consider.
As explained by WhatsApp chief Will Cathcart in response to the UK proposal:
“What’s being proposed is that we – either directly or indirectly through software – read everyone’s messages. I don’t think people want that.”