WhatsApp has a number of privacy settings that can be adjusted to suit your needs. These include who can see your last seen status, profile photo and information. You can also choose to disable read receipts, set disappearing messages and block contacts. In addition, you can limit media visibility and make chats more private by setting media visibility to My Contacts Except… or Nobody.
Turn Off Read Receipts
WhatsApp is a popular mobile messaging app that allows you to communicate with friends and family across the world. While this tool has numerous benefits, some people may feel uncomfortable with the idea of their conversations being monitored or tracked. Luckily, there are some simple steps you can take to protect your privacy in WhatsApp.
One way to keep your WhatsApp privacy safe is to turn off read receipts. This will prevent the person you’re communicating with from knowing when you’ve read their message. You can turn off read receipts in the settings menu on your phone.
Another way to protect your WhatsApp privacy is to set chat messages to disappear automatically. This will ensure that your conversations aren’t saved on the recipient’s device or backed up in iCloud. You can apply this setting to all chats or to individual ones. You can also choose to try a default message timer, which will make disappearing messages your chats’ default setting.
Other ways to control your privacy in WhatsApp include changing the group privacy settings. This will limit who can see your status, profile photo, and the “about” section of WhatsApp. You can also change the last seen feature to limit who can see your location.
Disable Media Visibility
By default, GB WhatsApp saves photos and videos that you receive from your contacts to your phone’s Camera Roll. Over time, this can clog up your storage space and create an unwelcome presence in your gallery app.
To solve this issue, you can disable media visibility for new chats on a global level. To do so, open the settings menu and select ‘Chats’. On this screen, you can choose to disable the auto-download of media files for new chats on a global basis or individually for each chat.
You can also decide whether to allow disappearing messages, a feature that allows users to send self-destructive messages to individuals or groups for a specific period of time. The message will self-destruct after the selected amount of time, and a notification is displayed in the group chat to let others know that you’re using disappearing messages. This setting can be enabled on a new chat or on individual chats, and the duration can be set for 24 hours, one week or three months.
Finally, WhatsApp offers options to backup your chat history on iCloud or Google Drive. However, unless you enable end-to-end encryption for these backups, they can be accessed by anyone with access to your devices, including Apple or Google employees and law enforcement. To avoid this, you can disable the iCloud and Google Drive backups for WhatsApp in the chat settings.
Limit Last Seen
If you don’t want your Last Seen status to be visible to everyone, it’s easy to limit it. To do so, open the Settings app and tap Privacy. From here you can fine-tune who can see your Last Seen setting, as well as About and Profile photo. Tap the three dots in the upper right corner to access the menu, then select either Everyone, My Contacts Only or Nobody.
WhatsApp’s latest update added a new option that allows you to control who can see your online/last seen status. This lets you hide your status from users who don’t have your phone number on their device and haven’t chatted with you before. Those who do know you or have chatted with you are still able to see your online status, however.
You can adjust this setting from the Account menu (iPhone) or the Action overflow menu (Android). Alternatively, you can also use an industry-leading VPN like NordVPN to secure your connection and prevent anyone from spying on your messages. In addition, a few apps offer one-click backup and recovery functions to prevent losing your data. This way, if you ever have to switch phones, you can still recover your data from the apps you use most frequently. This is much more convenient than having to manually transfer all of your chats.
Stop Sharing Location
If you want to stop sharing your live location with a person or group on WhatsApp, you can do so at any time. The other person will then only be able to see your real-time movements when you share your location again. This feature is highly encrypted and secure, and it doesn’t affect the accuracy of your GPS or Bluetooth signals on your phone.
You can also set how long you want to share your location before it expires. For example, you can share your location for 15 minutes, an hour, or 8 hours.
Changing your privacy settings can help you protect your WhatsApp conversations from others seeing when you have been on the app and what messages you have read. You can even limit who can see your profile photo and last seen status.
If you are concerned about your privacy, consider switching to Signal, which has stronger encryption protections than WhatsApp. This will prevent Google and Apple from accessing your messages, and it can protect you from being tracked by snoopers. Besides, it can automatically delete your messages after two days or 12 hours and allows you to send photos and videos that the recipient can only view once. It also lets you backup your chat history on iCloud or Google Drive but ensures that these conversations are protected by WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, so they cannot be read by Apple, Google, or turned over to law enforcement.
