While turning on disappearing messages provides you with some extra privateness, it’s value remembering that whoever you message may nonetheless screenshot or take {a photograph} of what’s on the display.

In addition to disappearing messages, you may also set photographs and views to View Once. This—fairly unsurprisingly—behaves precisely how it’s described: The message can solely opened one time and you’ll’t return to it as soon as it is closed. When sending a photograph or video, faucet the icon that’s contained inside a partial circle. If you ship a one-time picture or video, people cannot screenshot it.

Lock Down WhatsApp Messages

There are inevitably occasions when you’ll want to hand your cellphone to another person—so your youngsters can play video games, as an example, or to point out a good friend a photograph. WhatsApp has two options that may assist shield your message in case your cellphone falls into another person’s palms. First, you’ll be able to activate Screen Lock, which retains the app locked until you open it with Apple’s Face ID or different biometrics on Android units. To flip it on, go to Settings, Privacy, and choose Screen Lock. You’ll have to arrange the biometric choices before you turn the app lock on.

You can even lock down particular person chats in your cellphone. This signifies that to ship messages to locked chats, you’ll want to make use of your cellphone’s passcode, or your face or fingerprint to open up the chats and even see notifications from them. To flip it on, faucet on a chat and the individual’s identify, go to Chat lock, and choose the choice to lock the chat. This will transfer the chat into a brand new folder that may be accessed by swiping down on the Chats tab.

If you’re going for essentially the most non-public strategy, it’s additionally value contemplating that any message that pops up may reveal non-public info. New message notifications can embrace all the message or simply a few of its content material after they flash up in your display. If these notifications additionally sit unread, anybody choosing up your system could possibly learn them with out having to unlock the cellphone. These choices may be tweaked in Settings, Notifications, and Show Preview.

Stop People From Seeing Your Personal Info

While WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption stops legislation enforcement, web suppliers, and even Meta from seeing what you’re sending, there are nonetheless some further steps you’ll be able to take to extend your privateness in your cellphone and scale back the possibilities of your quantity being focused by spammers or scammers. Because WhatsApp is so common, it’s frequently the goal of social engineering assaults, devised to steal your private info. 

The methods to restrict the methods folks can work together along with your account are all discovered by way of Settings, adopted by tapping on Privacy. At the most straightforward, you’ll be able to faucet to show off learn receipts, the 2 blue ticks that present when somebody has seen your message. 

More efficient are the steps that cease folks from including you to teams. Under the Groups setting, there’s the choice to restrict who can add you to a gaggle. By default, that is set as “everyone.” However, it may be modified to My Contacts, or My Contacts Except…, permitting some exceptions. Deciding to restrict who can add you to teams doesn’t imply that you would be able to’t be a part of teams when folks aren’t in your contacts. Instead, folks wanting so as to add you to teams can request to take action by way of a separate message.

Within Privacy, you may also flip off who can see if you final checked out WhatsApp and if you have been final on-line, who can see your profile photograph, the About part, and WhatsApp Status. While within the privateness settings, you also needs to examine whether or not you’re sharing your stay location with anybody.

Switch to Signal

If you’re in search of extra privateness, switching messaging apps is an enormous upheaval however may very well be definitely worth the effort and time. As talked about earlier, our desire for combining end-to-end encryption with better ranges of privateness is Signal. A full rundown of its privacy options is here.