The popular WhatsApp groups will now have a new feature that promises to change the use of the famous messaging application.
Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, as well as the social networks Facebook and Instagram, announced this Thursday in a statement that it will allow the creation of “Communities” on its platform.
This means that users will be able to connect several groups under the same “umbrella”.
“With Communities, our goal is to raise the bar for how organizations communicate with a level of privacy and security found nowhere else ,” the company said in a press release.
“Currently available alternatives require applications or software companies to trust a copy of their messages , and we believe they deserve the higher level of security that end-to-end encryption provides,” the note added.
How do the Communities work?
According to the Meta release, enabling the new feature is very simple.
The user only has to touch a new tab that will appear at the top of the chats on Android and at the bottom on iOS systems. From there you can create a supergroup from scratch or unify multiple groups you’re already a part of.
The company clarified that the function is not yet available to all users , but said that it will soon be available “worldwide.”
In the Community, there will be a group in which the administrator can send messages that can be read by all its members.
However, participants only have the ability to chat in subgroups which, while they can create, must be approved by the “umbrella” administrator.
Administrators will also have the “power” to delete messages sent by anyone who is part of the Community.
They will also be able to see the phone numbers of all the people included, although not the participants , who will only have visibility of the contacts that are part of the subgroups they have joined.
To join someone to a Community, the person in charge must send them a link that will generate the same application.
Source: Meta
WhatsApp introduces changes related to user privacy
WhatsApp continues to add different features to improve the user experience and continue to be the leading messaging application in the market.
Among the most outstanding recent advances are those related to privacy , an axis that has become central for Meta, the company that owns the application.
After several months of testing for Android and iOS, and after those who had the Apple operating system benefited, now the company will allow the profile photo to be hidden for some users, according to the TyC Sports site .
After WhatsApp reported on its social networks that it was implementing new options for privacy control in order to protect online privacy, from now on all users will have the possibility to decide whether to give access to their photo to the contacts or prefer to make exceptions.
This can be achieved in just five steps:
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1. Press the three points in the upper right corner of the WhatsApp main screen and then go to Settings > Account > Privacy.
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2 . Select any option, in this case the Time of the last time, and search for My contacts, except…, select it and the complete list of WhatsApp contacts will open.
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3. Choose who you want not to see the time of last connection, and at the end accept the changes.
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4. Back on the main screen so you will see that the number of excluded contacts is now marked.
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5 . This can be replicated to hide the profile picture, information, and statuses of specific contacts.