WhatsApp Granular Privacy Controls: Who Can See Your Photos, About, and Last Seen

With the recent update, your WhatsApp account may become a much less public space. Even though the conversations themselves have always been private and even encrypted, your WhatsApp profile still reveals a lot to visitors. Now you can control who can or cannot see certain details of your online activity on the messenger.

Granular privacy controls are the name of more adjustable privacy options related to the public bits of information your profile reveals. Namely, it’s your user picture, your “Last Seen”, and your “About” section. All of these can be by default read even by strangers, but now it may change if you give it a minute and finely tune who can access what.

With granular controls, you can define who can see each of these for each bit separately. There are four options of who can see it: Everybody, My Contacts, My Contacts Except…, and Nobody. The third is the most attractive: with it, and you can hide these details from certain people on your contact list without banning them completely. It’s this option that appeared after the update that makes the control really granular.

With this new ability to partially blacklist someone, users now can embrace less radical ways of protecting their privacy. Previously to hide these details from someone too annoying, you had to remove them from contacts, block them, or hide these details from everybody at all. Now, you can hide your picture from some contacts, your About from others, and make a special list for those allowed to know when you were last seen.

Now, the only thing that would make this even easier is the whitelist option. If you could only make certain details visible to certain contacts and hide them from the rest, this would also be great. And what would you add to these granular controls? If you have an idea, we’d like you to share it with us in the comments!