Do you have that one friend in your group chat who can’t keep a secret to save their life? WhatsApp is giving you a solution to that problem with “advanced chat privacy,” a new feature currently being tested that allows you to block other people from exporting chats or automatically saving photos and other media you send them without your consent.
WABetaInfo reported on Monday that the toggle for the new chat privacy feature was spotted in the latest app beta for Android and iOS over the weekend. The idea of “advanced chat privacy,” which works for both individual and group chats, is to give its users better control over the information they share with anyone they’re chatting with to reduce the risk of accidental leaks, unauthorized data sharing, and archiving messages outside of the chat without their knowledge.
When the “advanced chat privacy” feature is toggled on, everyone in the group chat and the individual chat will be notified when the setting is turned on. This automatically blocks chat participants from exporting the entire chat history to outside networks and automatically saving media onto their device galleries, especially when the content of the chats and media contain sensitive information. The setting also disables Meta AI, which answers questions and generates images within the chat. However, “advanced chat privacy” is managed on a per-chat basis, meaning it won’t be automatically applied to every chat from WhatsApp’s general settings page. You would have to open the settings from the chat of your choice to enable the feature.
While the “advanced chat privacy” feature is a good step to enhancing user privacy on WhatsApp, people within those chats can bypass it by taking screenshots of the chats and screen-record videos shared within them, as WhatsApp decided not to implement screenshot detection. Those screenshots can still be taken either on the phone or on desktop via WhatsApp Web, so you may want to take a great deal of caution for who you allow into your chats and what information you relay to them.
WhatsApp hasn’t revealed when it will update the app to implement “advanced chat privacy,” as it is still being beta tested. We’ll let you know when the feature is fully rolled out.
