In WhatsApp’s privacy options you can choose with more or less precision who can see your last connection time, profile photo, info and status, but there is a very important thing that is beyond the control of users: who can see when you are online.
For starters, anyone can see if you’re online, whether they’re in your contacts or not, although the app started limiting it last year, still without giving the user any choice. Now we find out via WaBetaInfo that finally we can choose in the privacy options who can see that we are online at that time.
The option that should have been from the beginning
All messaging applications that are capable of showing when someone is online allow users to hide your status. It is not something new, we already had it in the messaging applications of yesteryear, such as MSN Messenger. Despite this, WhatsApp has ignored it in its 13-year history.
Although WhatsApp allows us to control who can see our last connection time, the current connection status (i.e. whether you are online or not) is public. This has been the cornerstone of WhatsApp spy apps, which constantly query a person’s status to create a map of when they use the app. This huge privacy issue seems to be finally close to being resolved.
In late 2021 we learned that WhatsApp was beginning to limit who could see online status, “making it harder for people you don’t know and haven’t chatted with to see your last online time and online status.” online”. Now the app is working on a privacy setting so you can choose who sees your connection.
The setting is not yet active for users and will share the spotlight with the last connection time setting. What’s more, it will only have two settings: All or “same as last connection time”. In this way, you can choose between being seen by the whole world, your contacts, the whole world except some contacts or nobody, but in a synchronized way with the time of last connection.
Via | WaBetaInfo
