03/18/2020 WhatsApp WHATSAPP POLICY
Europa Press
MADRID
WhatsApp is an application that facilitates communication, although some people end up abusing features such as the last connection time or status update, giving rise to uncomfortable situations or even harassment, which the company is trying to reverse with its latest changes.
The messaging application has recently introduced new privacy controls that allow users to adjust them to protect their information in features such as last connection, profile information and photo or status.
The company already allows, both on Android and iOS, to manage the privacy level of these four features. Thus, the user can decide that they are open to ‘Everyone’, in such a way that all users of the ‘app’ will be able to see said information, or to ‘Nobody’, preventing it from being seen completely.
In between, there are two more options: on the one hand, ‘My contacts’, which means that only the contacts saved in the agenda can see the information on the time of the last time the user was contacted, their profile picture, the information section and status updates. On the other, ‘My contacts, except…’, which excludes certain saved contacts from the possibility of accessing said information.
Whatever the preferred option, they can be found within the ‘Settings’, in the ‘Privacy’ section, where you only have to go into each feature to establish the desired level of privacy.
It is possible, however, to make a nuance. When the user is logged in, other users will still be able to see if they are currently ‘online’ or ‘writing’ a message, a feature that has no privacy controls.
On the other hand, read confirmations, known as blue ticks because they turn blue when the recipient has received the message and opened the chat to read it, also have privacy options
Specifically, in the same Privacy section, within the Settings, it is possible to mark or unmark the read receipts. The company warns that if they are disabled, other people will not be able to see the blue ticks, but the user himself will not see those of other people either.
With these settings it is possible to avoid situations in which a person insists that we reply to a message because they have seen that we have connected and we have not written to them, or when someone monitors the times we connect to WhatsApp, to name a couple of examples.
This story was originally published on June 27, 2022 5:44 a.m.
