WhatsApp is building new ways to increase user privacy and security in order to improve their experience while using the app. Mark Zuckerberg,founder and CEO of Meta, has recently shared something very important on his Facebook page. Three new privacy features to release to users on WhatsApp beta for Android, iOS, and Desktop. It will begin rolling out the features this month, highlighting them in a global campaign, starting in the UK.

Let’s know what the three features are and how they are going to work.

Leave silently

The popular messaging app currently alerts all members of a group chat to someone leaving or being removed by default. And while there are ways to disable this for individual group chats, the option to leave silently is not presented to users when they choose to “exit group” – sometimes causing awkwardness, embarrassment or drama for those trying to leave unnoticed. With the recent changes, users will be able to leave without notifying the other group chat users, only alerting group administrators.

Hide online status

WhatsApp is now giving you the ability to hide your online status. While earlier users were able to only hide their ‘Last Seen’ status, the company is now allowing you to hide your ‘Online’ indicator as well. WhatsApp now allows users to choose whom they want to share their ‘Online’ status indicator with. You can either completely hide the last seen online status from everyone, only unknown numbers, specific contacts, or from nobody. The feature will add a new “Who can see when i’m online” option under the last seen settings, with two options – ‘Everyone’ and ‘Same as Last Seen.’

Screenshot blocking for view once messages

View Once messages allow users to send media files that are only viewable once. View once images, however, were not all that foolproof as it still allowed people to take screenshots of the media file. Now, WhatsApp has added a screenshot blocking feature on View Once messages that will allow users to block people from taking screenshots of their images.

Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced that users can now delete messages up to 2 days after they are sent – an upgrade from the previous limit. Before the update, users could delete messages for everyone in the chat up to 24 hours after they had been sent. After that, they could only delete messages for themselves but they would still be visible to everyone else in the chat.