Tech

WhatsApp will let you selectively hide the time of the last connection

If there’s one widely used privacy feature on WhatsApp, it’s certainly it. to hide the last connection time. For whatever reason or reasons, practically since its launch we all began to see how the classic “Last time” and the date and time of its last connection began to quickly disappear from the information of many of our usual contacts. And personally, I thought it was a success, because there are people I don’t care if they know about it (and even if they use it to find out if I’m still alive, after a long time without contact), but in general, nobody cares if I’ve connected to the three in the afternoon or in the morning.

However, the nuance is the one indicated, “some people” and, when asked, what I would really like is to be able to make a selective adjustment, indicating which people I want to be able to access said information (and I access theirs, if they share it with me), but leave that field blank to the rest of the world. And, obviously, just as WhatsApp does, that this measure is bidirectional, that is, that I cannot see your connection data either.

And in this respect there is good news, and another somewhat less good. As we can read in WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is already testing a feature to selectively hide connection data. With this function, which has so far been deployed in the beta versions of the WhatsApp app for Android and iOS, users can, based on a configuration of sharing that information with everyone, block it specifically for certain contacts.

WhatsApp will let you selectively hide the time of the last connection

It is a step in the right direction, of course, but in my opinion it is formulated in the opposite direction, which implies a difference in philosophy in this regard. According to the WhatsApp model, the user shares by default, and only hides when he considers it necessary, whereas, in my opinion, the proper model would be hide by default, and share only on demand. Some kind of privacy feature with options opt in Y opt out.

Be careful, this is not a criticism of this WhatsApp function, everything that is an advance in privacy seems to me a step in the right direction and a success. Now, since it is still a beta version and, therefore, it is understandable that Meta, owner of the service, must be open to feedback about it, I believe that both in WhatsApp and in the rest of its services , all privacy options and features should be opt-out, not the other way around. That simple paradigm shift would save them a lot of trouble.

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