WhatsApp update allows you to choose who can view your Last Seen status
WABetaInfo never misses an opportunity for a thorough teardown any of the frequently released WhatsApp beta APK's, always catching new features before WhatsApp gets to roll them out.
The latest of these features is a newfound ability to choose who gets to see your Last Seen status. This is an extremely welcome update to those of us who are more privacy-conscious, and enjoy having our own space online sometimes.
At times, it can be nice to have the ability to go onto the messaging app to just re-read some old texts, or speak to a single person in private, without having your "active" status go off to everyone immediately, attracting hordes of new messages you didn't want to have to deal with in the first place (and whose senders will think you're ignoring them if you don't).
Until now, WhatsApp users' only option was to either turn off the ability to show their "Last Seen" status to everyone at once, or only to their contacts—without having a choice down to which individuals get to see the last time they logged on.
Not even Facebook offers such a specific feature yet, but it already lets you prevent specific people from seeing your post or tags. And since Facebo—er, Meta, as it's now called—does own WhatsApp, for all we know, Facebook could be next to have a "My contacts except..." option for users' Last Seen status.
This new feature allows you to essentially "soft-block" someone, or escape interaction with a person you'd prefer to avoid by appearing offline to them—without necessarily getting on their bad side by going all the way to blocking and deleting them.
According to WABetaInfo's findings, users will also get the ability to choose which contacts get to see their profile photo, as well as their About section. However, "soft-blocking" contacts from seeing your Last Seen status will also prevent you from seeing theirs, while this will not be the case for the About info and profile photo.
In other words, contacts may be prevented from seeing your About info or profile picture, but you will still be able to see theirs.
These welcome updates will be arriving with WhatsApp beta Version 2.21.23.14 (they're currently only being tested on select users). Once the update rolls out to your device, you will have the freedom to implement these extra privacy settings by going to WhatsApp > Account Privacy Settings.
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