WhatsApp improves privacy: leave groups without announcing it and block some screenshots | Technology

It has been Mark Zuckerberg himself and using, as usual, his Facebook profile, who has announced new features that improve WhatsApp privacy. As confirmed by the company in Spain, the new measures are aimed at “making three new privacy functions available to people, which will allow them to have greater control over their conversations and add protection to messaging.”

This new battery of measures is grouped into three major functions available to the user:

Leave groups discreetly

As we announced last May, WhatsApp will finally allow the user to leave a group discreetly and without the rest of its components receiving a notification. To date, leaving a group was a bitter pill for many users, since it was not exactly discreet: group members were notified with the dreaded “x has left the group” announcement, prior to all kinds of speculation. Will he be angry? Why is he gone?

This hurdle to which the user of the platform was subjected was the subject of many complaints from those who, in the end, chose to silence the groups so as not to be the unfriendly one who abandoned them. From now on, only the group administrator will be notified of the abandonment by one of its components, while the rest will not know this exit, unless they count the members of the group one by one.

Who sees the ‘Online’ status

Another of the bad things that the users of the platform were faced with was the visibility of their connection: if the boss sent a message, but they did not want to respond until night, any timely access to the app would show an “online ” visible to everyone. Including the boss. On the other hand, receiving a message and not reading it, but being online reading another message, could arouse suspicion: Why don’t you read me? Are you looking down on me?

From now on, the user will be able to configure that only his family or friends can see his connection. In this way, it will be possible to access the platform to take a look at the messages without being detected by those who do not want them to know our status.

Capture blocking (on certain messages)

But one of the functions most demanded by WhatsApp users has finally seen the light: it will be possible to prevent screenshots from being taken in some messages. Until now, the sender has no way of knowing if what he is typing (or the photos he is sending) is being recorded by the recipient in the form of a screenshot. Well, this is finally going to stop being possible, under certain circumstances, yes.

From now on, if you click on the ‘1’ button that appears when a photo is attached, it will tell the system not only that the photo can only be viewed once, but also that screenshots cannot be taken. This new function is especially indicated when you want to send photos only for the recipient and make sure that they are not going to be distributed through the platform.

When will these new features be available? From WhatsApp they confirm that the first two will be deployed throughout the month (remotely, without the user doing anything); the third, however, still does not have a specific date, since it is still in the testing phase, but it will arrive “soon”. What’s left in the pot? The user continues to demand the correction of what many consider an anomaly: that, once a message sent by mistake has been deleted, the recipient continues to see the alert “message deleted by sender” on his screen, a prelude, of course, to all of this. speculations.

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