WhatsApp is the mobile messaging app that allows you to send text messages and make phone calls and video calls to friends and family in different countries without paying international fees.
By default, the app has specific privacy settings in place that allow any user to see when you've last used the app (last seen), your profile photo, your "about" information, and read receipts. They also allow contacts to see your status updates, and any users can add you to groups.
If you'd like more privacy on the app, these settings can be changed at any time. Here's how to do it.
1. Open the WhatsApp app.
2. Tap the gear "Settings" icon in the bottom menu.
3. Tap "Account."
You can find the Account menu in Settings above the Chats icon. Abigail Abesamis Demarest/Business Insider4. Choose "Privacy."
Privacy settings are the first option under the Account menu.
Abigail Abesamis Demarest/Business Insider 5. Tap on the privacy setting you want to change, including Last Seen, Profile Photo, About, Groups, and My Status.
Quick tip: If you turn off read receipts, you won't be able to view read receipts for other users. You also cannot turn off read receipts for group chats.
There are numerous privacy settings you can adjust to keep yourself hidden on WhatsApp. Abigail Abesamis Demarest/Business InsiderQuick tip: If you make your "last seen" information private, you won't be able to view the "last seen" for other users.
6. Select a group from the list of options for that setting:
While the above are your main privacy control settings, consider a few WhatsApp tools and features that may help maintain your privacy while using the app.
Abigail Abesamis Demarest
Abigail Abesamis Demarest is a contributing writer for Insider based in New York.
She loves a good glazed donut and nerdy deep dives into the science of food and how it's made.
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WhatsApp is the spiritual successor of the text messaging we used to spend so much money on in our monthly phone plan. While WhatsApp includes many useful features, it can also make private information readily available. You may not know Facebook owns WhatsApp. With growing concern over how Facebook uses your information, it may be a good time to do a checkup of your WhatsApp privacy settings.
Facebook purchased WhatsApp from co-founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton in 2014. Acton left the company in 2017 and has often criticized Facebook harshly over their approach to privacy issues. On April 30th of 2018, Jan Koum announced he too was leaving the company. While Koum’s announcement was not critical of the company, people behind the scenes report that he too is concerned over Facebook’s use of personal information from WhatsApp.
It is quite telling that the creators of WhatApp have jumped the ship.
WhatsApp collects a great deal of user information by default in the app. Configuring your WhatsApp privacy settings can help you limit the data collected by the app to only the information you are comfortable providing. However, it is good to remember that you cannot use WhatApp without spilling some personal information. There are some alternatives to WhatsApp you might want to look at if you want to stay truely anonymous.
Update 2021: WhatsApp newest privacy policy includes more integrations between Facebook and WhatsApp, while also giving businesses more opportunities to use your data. While these new regulations won’t go into effect for all WhatsApp users (except those protected by the GDPR) until May of 2021, many users have already chosen to switch to different messaging apps for fear of losing control of their privacy. Apps such as Signal and Telegram have grown in popularity as a result.
If you wish to adjust your WhatsApp privacy settings you can take a look at the overview below. We explain where you can find the settings you need. Moreover, you can see what things you can change to heighten your privacy on WhatsApp.
In WhatsApp tap the menu button. From there click on “Settings” and look for “Account”. Under “Account”, you will find “Privacy”. Here is where the privacy settings you are looking for reside. By default, WhatsApp allows any user to see your profile photo, your “about” section, when you were last active in the app, and whether you have read a received message.
By default, when you receive a message in WhatsApp, any user can see when you read the message. You can turn this feature off for individual messages. Sometimes, it can be a good idea to not automatically inform the sender that you have seen their message. This can give you time to think about a response before returning a message.
However, read receipts are always on for group messages.
The “Last Seen” feature shows others when you were last active in WhatsApp. It can be useful to know if the person you are messaging checked in recently or hasn’t been active in a few days. You may not want that information available to others, though.
WhatsApp provide a couple of other options to choose from. Select “Nobody” to ensure your last seen information isn’t available to anyone. You should know if you select this option, you also will not be able to see others’ Last Seen information. Alternatively, you can choose to limit this information only to others in your contact list. For many, this is a reasonable compromise between usefulness and over-sharing.
You should also keep in mind that there are no options to hide when you are currently online. That information remains public no matter which options you select. WhatsApp also signals when you are typing. If you prefer to keep your activity online more private, WhatsApp doesn’t offer that security.
Your location settings are in a different section of the settings from your privacy settings. WhatsApp provides the ability to share your current location with others in an individual or group chat. When you share your location, you can set a time to continue sharing your location, or WhatsApp will continue to share until you tell it to stop. If you did choose to share your location previously without setting an expiration time, you may wish to stop sharing your location.
From the Settings menu, go to “Apps & Notifications” and tap on “App Permissions”. Find the Location option and tap on that. From here you can turn off all location permissions and stop sharing your location. If you just want to stop sharing your location with a chat, open that chat and tap “Stop Sharing”.
Facebook owns both WhatsApp and Instagram. Information on any of these platforms can flow to advertisers across any of these platforms, as well as reach you in Google searches and other websites online.
In an interconnected online world, even if your privacy settings in WhatsApp are set the way you want, it can be difficult to secure your privacy across the board online.
A first step could be to go through the privacy settings in all the social media apps you use. We have written guides for many of them, including: Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, and Google.
Another, more secure option would be to get a a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This puts a middleman between you and the services you use online to protect your privacy. A quality VPN service will provide a greater level of anonymity without sacrificing speed or convenience. In addition, a VPN service can provide other benefits like being able to stream the US version of Netflix while traveling overseas or getting around firewalls that prevent access to certain websites at work. For more information about VPNs and how they can help enhance your privacy online, go to our main article about VPNs.
Whatever option you choose, online security is becoming more important every day.
Know that not all your information is safe in the hands of large social media companies.
Each WhatsApp web user can set their own privacy settings in the application. Here, the visibility of information from the profile and the time of the last visit is blocked. Group invitation blocking is also available, which helps to get rid of unnecessary spam. To change your profile privacy settings, follow the instructions in this article.
All instructions in this article apply to users of mobile devices running on Android, iOS and KaiOS operating systems. First you need to go to the settings, paths for each platform are different:
Next, we will tell you how to change your account privacy settings.
To set the visibility of the last seen time of WhatsApp, follow the instructions:
Please note that the settings are mirrored - by prohibiting the display of the last visit time, you will not be able to see the visit time of your interlocutors. It is not possible to hide the "Online" and "Printing..." statuses.
WhatsApp does not require you to upload a profile photo. You can also upload a custom image here. To set the visibility of the photo, select the "Profile photo" item. Available options:
The selected settings will be automatically accepted.
Profile information is the line in which arbitrary text is entered. This text is visible when you select a new contact in the contact list. It is also displayed when viewing information about the interlocutors. By default it says "Hey there! I am using WhatsApp", the text can be changed in your profile settings.
To change the information visibility settings, select the "Information" item in the "Confidentiality" block and specify who will see the specified information:
At any time, you can choose a different option by going to the privacy settings.
The WhatsApp messenger provides the ability to publish statuses.
They can contain text, photo or video. Statuses are published in the "Status" tab on the main screen of the messenger. Here you can also see the status of your interlocutors. The following options are available in the status privacy settings:
Customize the display of statuses according to your preferences.
The messenger has a system for receiving read reports for sent messages - they are marked with two blue checkmarks. Messages received but not viewed are marked with two gray checkmarks. A single check mark means that the message has been sent but not yet received (for example, the recipient is offline or their phone is switched off).
Privacy settings allow you to disable sending and receiving read receipts. It must be remembered that by disabling the sending of reports, you automatically disable their receipt.
WhatsApp privacy settings now allow you to restrict yourself from being added to groups. Three options are available to choose from:
Select one of the available options.
The blacklist function also applies to privacy settings. To block a specific person, go to chat with him, click on the number or username at the top of the screen, select "Block" at the very end.
You can also file a complaint here.
Unlocking is done in privacy settings:
From now on, the person will be able to call and send you messages again.
Often faced with a situation where someone takes the phone without asking and starts digging - set up secure fingerprint login in WhatsApp. It is activated in the privacy settings. In this case, the smartphone should already have added fingerprints. To set the input lock use the instruction:
If necessary, secure login can be disabled at any time in the WhatsApp application settings.
April 30, 2020 Android iOS
With their help you will be able to use the messenger to the maximum.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messengers, with the help of which millions of people around the world communicate. However, many users still do not know all the features of the service. And among the latter, by the way, there are very useful ones. Let's talk about those.
Go to "Settings" → "Account" → "Privacy". Here you can set the visibility of personal data: profile photo, status and information about the last visit. If you want this information to be hidden from everyone, just select the "No one" option.
For iOS, identical settings are found in the "Privacy" item in the account settings.
Format messages Not everyone knows that text in messages can be bold, italic or strikethrough. To do this, you need to put a certain symbol before the word and after it.
Bold is an asterisk, italic is an underscore, and strikethrough is a tilde. For example: *word*, _word_, ~word~.
With active correspondence, the ability to reply to the desired message helps to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. In WhatsApp, this feature is implemented especially conveniently.
All you have to do is swipe on a chat message from left to right and it will attach to your next message, indicating exactly what you replied to.
Also, to do this, you can simply hold down the message and click on the arrow that appears in the top menu.
Adding a message to your favorites will allow you to quickly return to it without using the chat search. This is useful when you need to save some coordinates, a shopping list, a task, and so on.
To add, you just need to hold down any message in the conversation and select the button with the image of an asterisk. It will immediately be added to a special menu, which can be accessed on Android through three dots in the upper right corner, and on iOS through the WhatsApp settings.
General mailing is especially useful when you need to share something with a large number of users without grouping them together. The function is available in the menu by pressing the three dots in the upper right corner. The message will be sent to everyone you mark in your contact list. Their answers will be visible only to you.
Not everyone knows that in WhatsApp you can find out the specific time when a person received a message and when he read it. To do this, hold down the desired message in the chat, click on the three dots in the upper right corner and select "Info". On iOS, after pinching, select "Data" from the menu.
This feature is very useful when you can't reach a person and you don't even know if they received your message. Note, however, that this only works if the user has not disabled "Read Receipt" in their privacy settings.
Unlike many other instant messengers, WhatsApp allows you to set up notifications about new messages and calls for each contact or group individually. This allows, for example, not only to turn off the sound signal for messages from a certain person, but also to select some kind of melody specifically for him.
With this option, you can find out exactly who wrote to you without even looking at the smartphone display. To configure, you need to open the contact or group menu and go to the "Individual notifications" item. There, by checking the box next to "Use", you need to edit the necessary items.
Disabling this feature is especially useful when roaming, as your mobile operator may charge you a significant fee for downloading data.
