WhatsApp Pushes fresh tech upgrades, to block third-party apps from seeing its users’ online details

Pushing fresh tech upgrades, the Meta-owned WhatsApp has announced to initiate a new privacy update to prevent unknown contacts to see a user’s last seen and online status. The new feature has been reportedly rolled out for both Android and iOS-enabled devices.

According to the latest reports, so far some third-party apps from Google Play Store on Android and Apple App Store on iOS can access data from the app to log ‘online’ status time and ‘Last Seen’ time. WhatsApp has now introduced some safeguards to stop such apps from accessing such data.

“These latest improvements protect users. The new feature by WhatsApp does not show up the last seen and the online status if you have never chatted with another WhatsApp account. Since those third-party apps don’t have an active chat with you, they cannot see when you are online,” a recent tech journal quoted.

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Further, WhatsApp is also working on a feature that will enable users to restrict certain information including their ‘Last Seen’ and profile picture from specific contacts.

WhatsApp has recently announced that its users will now have the option to turn on disappearing messages by default for all new chats. The Meta-owned platform said that it is adding two new durations for disappearing messages: 24 hours and 90 days, as well as the existing option of 7 days.

“When enabled, all new one-on-one chats you or another person start will be set to disappear at your chosen duration, and we’ve added a new option when creating a group chat that lets you turn it on for groups you create,” WhatsApp said in a statement.

The new feature is optional and does not change or delete any of your existing chats, the company said.