Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg has announced that WhatsApp users will now be able to exit groups without everyone in the group knowing. This is part of new privacy features introduced by the social media platform.
With the ‘Leave Groups Silently’ feature, instead of notifying the full group when leaving, only the admins will be notified. This feature will start rolling out to all users this month.
In addition to that, Zuckerberg said WhatsApp users can also prevent people from doing a screenshot of messages tagged as ‘view once’.
What they are saying
Announcing this via his Facebook page today, Zuckerberg wrote: “New privacy features coming to WhatsApp; exit group chats without notifying everyone, control who can see when you’re online, and prevent screenshots on view once messages.”
- “We’ll keep building new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations,” he added.
- Whatsapp also issued a statement saying that “seeing when friends or family are online helps users feel connected to one another, but everyone has had times when they wanted to check their WhatsApp privately. For the times you want to keep your online presence private, WhatsApp is introducing the ability to select who can and can’t see when you’re online.”
- On the ‘View Once Messages’ feature, it noted that ‘View Once’ is already an incredibly popular way to share photos or media that don’t need to have a permanent digital record.
- “Now WhatsApp is enabling screenshot blocking for View Once messages for an added layer of protection. This feature is being tested and will be rolled out to users soon,” it said.
The company added that the introduction of these new features is backed by a new WhatsApp privacy study which found that 72% of people value being able to speak in an honest, unfiltered way, but more than 47% are only comfortable doing this in a safe, private space.