It was Mark Zuckerberg himself who announced the news
Whatsapp will have new features from September that aim to improve users’ privacy, as well as help to avoid embarrassing moments. The announcement was made by the CEO of Meta, which owns the platform.
One of the new updates is silent exit from groups. There are many people who belong to groups that are of little interest to them but are inhibited from leaving them, as all group members are warned, which can result in uncomfortable situations. From now on, this is no longer the case – only administrators will receive the notification.
In order to protect users, the platform will also implement a measure that already exists on Snapchat: it will be impossible to take a screenshot of momentary photographs, that is, those that last only a few seconds. This measure is part of the company’s objective to improve customer privacy policies. Even so, security is not fully guaranteed and it is necessary to warn of the risk of the sharing being kept by the receiver, as there are tampered devices that can circumvent the measure or people who can use another cell phone to take pictures.
Finally, and a measure that could also be quite beneficial, is the possibility of choosing which contacts will know when a person is online – that is, when he is active on the platform. Until now, the social network only allowed to hide information about the last time the user had opened Whatsapp, but the online status was visible to everyone.
Mark Zuckerberg chose to announce the changes to his Facebook account, highlighting the company’s willingness to protect the exchange of messages between people. “We will continue to build new ways to protect messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”
Also the deputy director of product of Whatsapp, Ami Vora, defended that the platform is “the safest place to have a private conversation” and that they continue to work to improve it. “To publicize these new features, we are also starting a global campaign, starting with the UK and India, to educate people about how we work to protect their private conversations on WhatsApp,” she said, quoted by The Guardian.
In April, the messaging platform had already adopted other functionalities that intended to facilitate interactions and give more control to group administrators. At the time, the maximum number of people per call was increased, group administrators were allowed to delete problematic or erratic messages, the creation of subgroups within groups was allowed, the weight of files sent was increased and it became possible to like posts.
–
