WhatsApp is becoming more private by showing your online status only to your existing contacts, or those you’ve chatted with before.
WhatsApp is working toward expanding its user privacy by hiding their online status from strangers. According to a recent WABetaInfo report, WhatsApp is starting to hide Android and iOS users’ “Last seen” status from people outside their contact list by default.
The app is changing the visibility of a user’s timestamp for the last time from “everyone” to “my contacts,” thus excluding any strangers from seeing when they were last online.
Twitter user Msg abbasi was able to receive confirmation of the rollout of the feature from WhatsApp support, which explained that the change will not affect the online visibility option when it comes to friends, family and businesses they already have in their contacts or have messaged before.
The service seems to be automatically rolling out the feature for everyone all users.
Therefore, people and businesses that a user hasn’t previously chatted with are already unable to see the user’s status. Up until now, WhatApp’s default option was to allow anyone to see a user’s last seen status unless they opted to hide their personal online logs to only be visible for contacts or for nobody.
For the past few weeks, Whatsapp has also been allowing beta users to hide their online status from some contacts, giving users more flexibility and control over their privacy.