“Confidential Message” feature will become possible in the new WhatsApp update
According to Aetna and quoted by the Independent, the Chat Lock feature announced by Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp, means that a selection of messages can only be locked with a password or biometric (biometric identifier) such as a fingerprint or face. will be available.
Messages are also hidden on the recipient’s phone or computer screen to prevent others from seeing their content or the sender.
In a blog post announcing the WhatsApp update, Meta said, “We believe this feature will be great for users who occasionally share their phone with a family member, or for those times when our phone is in the middle of a very special text message. It is someone else’s hand.”
“In the next few months, we will add more options to the chat lock feature; including the ability to lock related devices and create a custom password for chats so that the user can use a unique password different from the password of his phone.”
This new feature of WhatsApp will be launched this week for more than two billion users of this messaging program in the world.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, wrote in a Facebook post: “The new ability to lock chats on WhatsApp makes your conversations more private.”
“These conversations remain hidden in a password-protected folder, and the sender’s name or message content will not be displayed in the notifications.”
This latest update comes just a few days after WhatsApp users expressed widespread concern about a “disturbing” feature related to the app’s privacy settings.
Messages on users’ phones appeared to indicate that WhatsApp was eavesdropping on users while they were sleeping, and notifications from the app about activating the phone’s microphone appeared in the privacy menu of Google’s Android operating system.
WhatsApp considers the cause of this problem to be a bug in Android and claims that it never accesses the microphone of the phone or other device without the user’s permission.
In response to a Twitter message on this issue, WhatsApp said: “Users’ microphone settings are completely in their hands.”
“Once permission is granted, WhatsApp only accesses the user’s microphone when they are talking or recording a voice or video message, and even then the connection is protected by end-to-end encryption; As a result, WhatsApp is unable to hear it.”