Whatsapp New Feature Lets Users Hide Active Status

The makers of the wildly popular messaging app are developing a new feature that will let users hide their online status, as reported by the Whatsapp news website WABetaInfo. In other words, you might disable the little in-app signal that shows you’re online, making it possible to use the app more covertly.

This is related to another recent wave of privacy enhancements on Whatsapp that gave you the option to choose who may view your most recent online status. You would be able to mirror that list to your online status, so the same individuals you trust to see your “last seen” indicator would also be able to see when you are presently using the app, according to the beta feature WABetaInfo discovered.

This feature has numerous and apparent uses. There are instances when all you want to do is log into a service secretly. Perhaps you only want to examine a certain message log and don’t want to chat to anyone, or perhaps you’re intentionally trying to avoid a bothersome relative or even a harasser. Though it comes as a bit of a surprise that Whatsapp didn’t already have this feature, it’s still better late than never.

It is now time for every other software to provide this function as well. After a message has been sent, Whatsapp offers the opportunity to delete it. Only communications that are at least an hour old can use this function, though. This is an extension of Whatsapp initial 8-minute time restriction for users to erase chats. The corporation is now raising the threshold so that users may delete communications that are older than two days.