Instant messaging service WhatsApp is introducing more features to make it tough for the strangers to peep in to your online status. It was just a few weeks back when the service allowed the beta users to hide their ‘last seen’ from some of the contacts and now the developers have taken a step higher and made it harder for the strangers to see the last online status of another user. WhatsApp is changing the default setting of its ‘last seen’ visibility from ‘everyone’ to ‘my contacts’ for iOS and Android users.
The new default setting was also confirmed to a user by WhatsApp support and it seems like the service is being automatically rolled out for everyone. The fresh change would mean that people or businesses with whom you have not interacted earlier will not be able to see your status and vice versa. However, the users will still be allowed to manually set the personal online logs with a choice to be visible for contacts or even nobody. Earlier the service allowed anyone to see everyone’s ‘last seen’ status by default.
The fresh setting is likely to be a blow for the third party apps that allow even the strangers to monitor the online status that gives them a detailed status of chat habits and could also give an idea about the user’s sleep and work patterns. Such services are largely dependent on the publicly available data, they will soon become useless. For now WhatsApp manually allows users to flip back the ‘last seen’ status to visible for everyone. But the recent behavior of the company has indicated that it might even be completely removed at some point.
Even though it is highly recommended not to share your online status with people not just for privacy concerns but also for the fact that it is a change for better. WhatsApp is constantly trying to make its services more private.
Photo Credits: Pixabay
