WhatsApp is now letting you decide who gets to view certain aspects of your profile.
This week, Meta’s popular messaging and calling app announced via a tweet that it is offering new privacy options for its users, including the ability to choose “who from your contact list can see your Profile Photo, About, and Last Seen status.”
🔒 To further protect your privacy online, we’re rolling out new options to your privacy control settings 🔒
Now you can select who from your contact list can see your Profile Photo, About, and Last Seen status. For more information follow this link: https://t.co/UGMCx2n70h
— WhatsApp (@WhatsApp) June 15, 2022
According to a WhatsApp’s Help Center page on the matter, your privacy settings, unless they are reconfigured, allow the following: All users can add you to groups. Contacts can view your status updates. All users can view your read receipts, profile picture, Last Seen, and About information.
But if you choose to configure WhatsApp’s new privacy settings, you’ll have more control over who can view the aforementioned profile information. Profile information such as your photo, Last Seen, About, and status can all be adjusted to one of four privacy options: Everyone, My Contacts, My Contacts Except, and Nobody. Essentially all of these options let you choose the visibility of your profile information based on the audience you’d like to have access to it.
It is worth noting, however, that these new privacy settings do come with some caveats: Not sharing your Last Seen means you can’t see the Last Seen of others. WhatsApp does not offer a way to adjust “who can see when you’re online or typing …”
In addition to selecting who can view your profile information, WhatsApp also lets you decide who can can view your read receipts and who can add you to groups. Not sharing read receipts also results in you not being able to view others’ read receipts. Group chats still offer read receipts regardless of your settings. If one of your friends doesn’t have read receipts enabled, that also stops you from seeing “if they’ve viewed your status updates.”
On Android and iOS, you can access these settings by navigating to Settings > Account > Privacy.