WhatsApp opens the door to silent exits from annoying groups

WhatsApp customers will quickly be capable of keep away from social awkwardness by gracefully – and silently – leaving annoying teams, the corporate has introduced.

Presently, should you depart a WhatsApp group, each member is notified, which might be embarrassing for smaller teams and worsening for bigger ones.

After the replace, a part of a sequence arriving on the app over the approaching month, customers will be capable of depart a bunch silently, with solely the directors receiving a notification. The corporate is looking the updates “privateness options”, which embrace others that it says improve safety for customers.

Customers can already ship Snapchat-style ephemeral messages with the “view as soon as” setting on the chat app, which deletes the picture after it has been considered. Now, WhatsApp will borrow one other characteristic from Snapchat and try to dam screenshots for these messages. The characteristic is being examined and can be obtainable to customers “quickly”, WhatsApp says.

Blocked screenshots should not a assure of safety, since customers can all the time take an image of the display with one other system, or obtain the message on a “rooted” or “jailbroken” system. Nevertheless, by making it tougher to avoid wasting a picture that was meant to solely final just a few seconds, the corporate hopes consumer privateness is secured.

A 3rd replace lets customers restrict who can see when they're on-line, letting them expose that delicate info to family and friends while not having to tell the entire world of once they’re checking their telephones.

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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of WhatsApp’s mum or dad firm, Meta, stated in a Fb put up revealing the modifications: “We’ll hold constructing new methods to guard your messages and hold them as non-public and safe as face-to-face conversations.”

Ami Vora, head of product at WhatsApp, added: “We consider WhatsApp is essentially the most safe place to have a personal dialog. And to unfold the phrase about these new options, we’re additionally kicking off a worldwide marketing campaign, beginning with the UK and India, to coach folks about how we work to guard their non-public conversations on WhatsApp.”