Till now anyone could see your profile picture, as well as Last Seen time, just by adding you to their contact list. That is going to change now. WhatsApp has now added a Privacy option to WhatsApp for Android that lets you hide Last Seen time, hide profile picture, and hide Status. You can choose to hide these from all, or just from the ones who are not in your contact list. This feature has not rolled out in Google Play Store, but has been added to Whatsapp downloaded directly from its website (from here). I am sure this would be available in Play Store also shortly, so you can wait for it be automatically added to your Whatsapp when it next updpates; or you can download WhatsApp apk from the website to experience it right away ( I downloaded it from website, and did not run into any issues).
These changes have been introduced for Android only. Some of these features were already present for iOS version of WhatsApp.
How To Use Privacy Settings in WhatsApp To Hide Last Seen Time and Hide Profile Picture:
Privacy option was not available till now on WhatsApp for Android, but has been added as a part of this update. Once you have updated your WhatsApp, go to Settings, and then click on Account. Under Account, you will see a new option called “Privacy”. This is where all the magic happens.
How to Hide Last Seen Time in WhatsApp:
Let’s first see how you can hide last seen time in WhatsApp. Once you are in Privacy menu, you will see an option for “Last Seen”. Click on This. It will open a small pop-up box, which has three possible options:
- Everyone: This option shows your Last seen time to everyone.
- My Contacts: This option shows Last Seen time to only your contacts, and hides from others.
- Nobody: This setting hides Last Seen time from everyone.
How to Hide Profile Picture in WhatsApp:
Another thing that you can do with this new Privacy option is to hide Profile Picture. For this, you will see option of “Profile Photo” under Privacy. Clicking on that will bring up same three options as for Last seen time, and you can choose whether your Whatsapp profile picture should be visible to everyone, or to only your contacts, or to no one.
In the same manner as above, you can set privacy settings for Status as well.
Final Verdict:
I am pretty happy to see that WhatsApp has finally added this Privacy option, and given control in hands of users that whether they want to show their last seen time or Profile picture to only their friends, or to everyone, or to none. This has been a long awaited, and welcome change. I hope another change WhatsApp adds is to disable the information that message sent to someone has been read by that person. The best way to do that would be with a condition that if you choose to disable message read notification for yourself, then you can’t see that for others as well. This will ensure that if someone tries to hide this information about themselves, they can’t see it for others as well. Pretty fair, isn’t it?
So, what do you think about this Privacy option that WhatsApp has introduced for Android? Will you use it? What would be your default settings for Privacy? Pour your heart out in comments section below.