WhatsApp Introduces Enhanced Privacy Controls For Profile Photos And ‘Last Seen’ Status

As the most popular messaging app in the world, WhatsApp has to keep improvising in order to keep the rest of the competition at bay.

And this time, it is introducing a few enhancements to the app, which should come in handy to those users who concern their privacy.

After previewing some features in beta, WhatsApp is rolling out greater privacy controls for Profile Photo, About, Status and Last Seen settings, the company tweeted.

Before this, users could only block those settings for Everyone, My Contacts or Nobody.

With the update, WhatsApp adds a "My Contacts Except" option that offers far more granular control.

As the name suggests, the new option allows users to show their WhatsApp Profile Photo, About, Status and Last Seen information to people in their contacts list except those they want to exclude.

Among other things, the Last Seen status is a particular privacy danger, as it indicates when a person last checked the app.

This feature, while extremely useful, does provide a way for contacts to find out if someone may have potentially seen their message, even if they have read receipts turned off.

With the updated feature, users should be able to shut off that feature for certain people, while also blocking Profile Photo, About and Status for individual users.

But it's worth noting that if users don't share their your Last Seen with others, they won't be able to see theirs either, just like read receipt, with the only difference being that the latter always remains on for group chats even when users have turned it off.

Users can access this updated settings by visiting the WhatsApp's Settings option, and navigate to Account, and then access the Privacy menu.

On top of that, WhatsApp has also added a few updates to group calls.

Through the updates, users can finally mute others, message specific people, and see a banner when someone joins offscreen.

As for the latter, the feature should be useful indicator, so users can more easily see when more people join large calls, as explained by Head of WhatsApp.