WhatsApp users will be able to leave groups without everyone knowing, under new privacy features.
The changes will also allow people to control who can see when they’re online and prevent screenshots of auto-deleting ‘Look once’ messages.
The features are described as ways to keep users’ messages “as secure as face-to-face conversations” by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and are launching alongside a global advertising campaign starting in the UK and India.
When people on WhatsApp leave group chats right now, the entire chat gets notified that they’ve left, potentially attracting unwanted attention. The company says now only admins will get a notification.
The app also broadcasts to all of a user’s contacts when they’re online and the app is open, something users will be able to choose to share.
Earlier, WhatsApp warned users to “only send photos or videos with ‘View Once’ media to trusted people”, as it is possible to take a screenshot or record the screen of the media before it disappears.
Some saw the move as another feature that WhatsApp copied from Snapchat after the introduction of statuses in 2017.
In his post announcing the new WhatsApp updates, Mr Zuckerberg wrote: “We will continue to build new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”
Read more: Watchdog calls for scrutiny of government use of private messaging apps
The features will appear in an advertising campaign that will include a billboard at Wandsworth Roundabout in south-west London.
The changes come as Meta faces a growing body of criticism over how its privacy features can be abused by people looking to evade law enforcement.
Last month, two senior technical directors at GCHQ, the UK’s cyber intelligence agency, published a paper analyzing how social media platforms expose children to sexual abuse online.
Earlier this year, a government-funded ad campaign called No Place To Hide aimed to highlight the challenges end-to-end encrypted messages pose to police investigating crimes involving child sexual abuse.
Meta has repeatedly stated that it believes that end-to-end encryption is the only way to ensure that users can safely send messages to each other without a third party eavesdropping.
Mr Zuckerberg announced plans to transform the platform’s privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2019, making it impossible for Meta itself to read the content of messages users share, similar to how it cannot access the content of WhatsApp messages.
However, these changes have not yet been implemented on other platforms amid concerns that they would blind law enforcement to incidents of babysitting and abuse on their platforms and could provoke a secret government ban.
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