The truth is that regular chats held through the program are not end-to-end encrypted, despite Facebook Messenger’s assertions to the contrary. This puts your sensitive information at great danger.
Regular users of WhatsApp will be familiar with the “Last Seen” status, which appears at the top of the discussion thread and lets you know when a contact last opened and used the app.
To prevent other contacts from knowing when you were last online, WhatsApp used to let you disable your Last Seen status. However, the setting’s options were only “Everyone,” “My Individuals,” and “Nobody,” and there was no way to establish exceptions for specific contacts.
The good news is that WhatsApp is changing things up by introducing the option “My Contacts Except…”, which allows you to choose particular contacts so they are unable to see when you were last active on the messaging app.
Here’s how to make the change to your privacy settings in the WhatsApp app for mobile.
- In WhatsApp, tap the Settings tab (the cog icon) at the bottom of the screen.
- Tap Account -> Privacy.
- Tap Last Seen.
- Select My Contacts Except….
- Choose the people from your contacts list that you want to hide your Last Seen status from.
- When you’ve finished selecting contacts, tap Done in the top-right corner of the screen.
If you don’t see the new option in the Last Seen menu, make sure you’ve updated WhatsApp to the latest version, then try again.