WhatsApp might soon allow you to hide your online status

WhatsApp is planning to soon give you the ability to hide your online status from the contacts that you want. As one of the world’s leading messaging platforms, Whatsapp routinely comes up with new features for the convenience of its users.

A month back the company was working on letting users export their chat backups from Google Drive. According to WaBetaInfo, this new feature from Whatsapp will be under its privacy controls. The feature currently is in testing and it will allow you to choose who can see if you are online or not. 

The app already has a feature of hiding your last seen, just so you can choose to ignore someone being guilt-free. This new feature will also help the company catch up with Telegram in terms of privacy. Whatsapp says that they got tons of requests from users every year to introduce this feature as it provides you more privacy. Maybe you don’t prefer talking to someone or are just fed up with someone who stalks you, either way, this can be a good way of tackling that.

You can access this new setting by going into your ‘Last Seen’ settings. Here, a new section has been introduced that reads ‘Who can see when I’m online’. In that section, there will be two options which are ‘Everyone’ and ‘Same as last seen’. I will simplify this for you, if your ‘Last Seen’ is ‘Nobody’ then nobody can see that you are online regardless. If your ‘Last Seen’ is ‘My Contacts’, then those who are not in your contacts can’t see if you are online.

Whatsapp is taking active efforts from its side to level up the privacy that users get. Last year, the company introduced a feature that automatically filters the contacts that you have on your phone that you haven’t chatted with and stops showing them your ‘Last Seen’. They took this step to prevent third-party apps from monitoring users’ last seen and online status. Still, people you have talked to once or twice could see you’re last seen, but the new update will now take care of that as well.

It’ll be interesting to see Whatsapp’s next steps to make their security and privacy even better.