WhatsApp is ramping up its feature set for the past few months. After last year’s privacy policy debacle, many informed users shifted to Telegram and Signal. The abrupt shift hurt the Meta-owned instant messaging service, but its user base didn’t shrink by that much.
Last month was very exciting for WhatsApp users with new features like Communities and increased file sharing size. Now, WhatsApp is planning to add a new feature that will hide your WhatsApp status from everyone.
As you know, the status feature is public to everybody while the Last Seen feature can be extensively customized. In the future, you will be able to hide your status from a select few or all contacts in your WhatsApp account.
WhatsApp status feature: More details
WABetaInfo was the first to spot this development in the beta build of WhatsApp. The primary intention of adding this future is to keep your active status private (if you need it). Even if you hid your last seen from select few or all accounts, users can still see the online label below your name in the chat. But WhatsApp has now realized that users may prefer to hide their active status permanently.
In the image shared by WABetaInfo, there is a new feature “Who can see when I’m online”. It offers two options – Everyone and Same as Last Seen. It is clear that the feature doesn’t offer any other granular control like offering the option to choose specific contacts.
The second option makes sense in some ways because you wouldn’t want people to see your active status and last seen simultaneously. Since the feature is currently in the Beta phase, you can expect the WhatsApp status feature to offer granular controls in the future. We covered the story about the feature last year in December which you can read here.
