WhatsApp opens the door to silent exits from annoying groups | WhatsApp
WhatsApp users will soon be able to avoid social awkwardness by gracefully — and quietly — leaving annoying groups, the company has announced.
Currently, if you leave a WhatsApp group, every member is notified, which can be annoying for small groups and irritating for larger ones.
After the update, which is part of a series coming to the app over the coming month, users will be able to leave a group silently, with only admins receiving a notification. The company calls the updates “privacy features,” which include others it says improve user security.
Users can already send ephemeral Snapchat-style messages with the “view once” setting on the chat app, which deletes the image after it’s been viewed. Now WhatsApp will borrow another feature from Snapchat and attempt to block screenshots for these messages. The feature is being tested and will be available to users “soon”, WhatsApp says.
Blocked screenshots are no guarantee of security, since users can still take a picture of the screen with another device, or receive the message on a “rooted” or “jailbroken” device. However, by making it more difficult to save an image that was supposed to last only a few seconds, the company hopes that user privacy is secured.
A third update lets users limit who can see when they’re online, allowing them to expose this sensitive information to friends and family without having to let the world know when they’re checking their phone.
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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of WhatsApp’s parent company Meta, said in a Facebook post revealing the changes: “We will continue to create new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations. .”
Ami Vora, Product Manager at WhatsApp, added: “We believe WhatsApp is the safest place to have a private conversation. And to raise awareness of these new features, we’re also launching a global campaign, starting with the UK and India, to let people know how we’re working to protect their private conversations on WhatsApp.
theguardian Gt
