For those who are very particular about privacy settings on various aspects of their messaging app, not just end-to-end encryption, it looks like WhatsApp is bringing some improvements for you soon. The current 3 privacy settings for Last Seen, Profile Picture, and About are already pretty useful, if you know about them, that is. Soon you’ll be able to add another option for who can see your last seen feature if you’re into more granular settings for all aspects of your messaging experience.
WABetaInfo shares an upcoming reworked privacy settings option for WhatsApp. If you didn’t know it yet, you currently have several options as to who can see your Last Seen, Profile Picture, and About. Not all the people you’re interacting with on the messaging app may be actual friends or people you would want to have that kind of information. The current options are Everyone, My Contacts, and Nobody.
The other new option that WhatsApp will be introducing soon is “My contacts except…” which means you can now disable it for specific contacts. With the present options, if you didn’t want specific people to see your Last Seen, you have to chose Nobody which basically means, well, no one will be able to see it. But when this new option rolls out, at least you’ll be able to just choose which contact you don’t want to see when you’re last online or your profile picture and about details.
If you choose to disable last seen for specific contacts, you also will not be able to see theirs, which should be fair. The screenshot shared is for the Last Seen privacy settings but this will also apply to the other two privacy settings. It’s also taken from WhatsApp for iOS but it will of course eventually be available for the Android app too, we don’t know if at launch or eventually.
These new privacy settings options are still in development and will eventually be enabled for beta testers first. Let’s see how fast (or slow) they will roll this out in both the beta and stable version.
