WhatsApp has further strengthened messaging security by adding a feature that allows you to keep chats private – from anyone who might have access to your phone. We innocently wonder who might want such a feature.
Don’t want your partner to find out you’re texting an attractive work colleague, but you both happen to have the same phone? Don’t worry – WhatsApp can help you flirt privately until you’re completely satisfied.
On November 30, the messaging app, owned by Meta, launched a new feature that allows cell phone owners to protect their conversations with a “secret code.”
WhatsApp describes this as “an additional way to protect chats and make them harder to access if someone else has access to your phone or you share a phone with someone else.”
The company adds that the secret code feature is an extension of the Chat Lock feature released earlier this year, which was described as a way to “protect your most intimate conversations with another layer of security.”
At the time, WhatsApp described Chat Lock as a way to remove the subject of a conversation from your Inbox and store it in a folder that can only be accessed with “a device password or biometric data such as a fingerprint.”
Apparently that wasn’t enough for WhatsApp’s more privacy-conscious users, who are now given the option to “set a unique password other than the one you use to unlock your phone to give locked chats an extra layer of privacy.”
The post adds: “You’ll have the option to hide the Locked Chats folder from your chat list so they can only be discovered by typing a secret code into the search bar.”
And if that’s not enough, the new feature is also handy: it’s designed to make it easier to – dare we say it? – abrupt exit.
“Now, when there’s a new chat you want to block, you can tap the long button to block it, rather than having to go into the chat settings,” WhatsApp said in a statement.
The messaging app seems to think that some users who share a cell phone with someone else need a lot of privacy.
What, one wonders, could they possibly be thinking?
