WhatsApp now lets you hide your profile picture and ‘Last seen’ status from specific people..

WhatsApp announced this week that it’s rolling out the ability for users to select who from their contact list can see their profile photo, about and “Last seen” status. Prior to the official launch, the new privacy setting was available to select users as part of a limited beta.

Up until now, users had three privacy options to choose from to decide who could see their profile photo, about and Last seen status. The options were: everyone, my contacts and nobody. Now, there’s a fourth option titled “My contacts except…” With this new option, you can exclude specific people in your contacts from seeing your profile photo, about and Last seen status. It’s worth noting that if you choose to hide your Last seen status from others, you won’t be able to see theirs either.

How to use new privacy features

WhatsApp's new privacy features are not as extensive as Telegram which already supports hiding last seen, profile photos on a per-contact basis. But this appears to be a convenient feature for people who tend to hide their personal information from banking and business accounts on WhatsApp.

Here’s how you can use WhatsApp's new privacy features.

Open WhatsApp and head over to the app’s settings. Now, tap on ‘Account’ and then ‘Privacy’ and tap on desired personal information you want to hide. You will see the ‘My contacts except’ option, from that menu, you can select the contacts with whom you don’t want to share personal information such as online status, profile picture or last seen.

Business Insider India

With all these new security features WhatsApp is trying to give more control to users over its personal data.

The new privacy option is now rolling out to all iPhone and Android users around the globe. You can access them by navigating to the privacy section in your account settings.

WhatsApp announced this week that it’s also rolling out new features for group calls. Most notably, the app now lets you mute or message specific people on a call. The app has also added a new helpful indicator to make it easier for users to see when more people join large calls.

The launch of these new features comes as WhatsApp announced earlier this week that it was adding the ability for users to transfer their conversation chat history, photos, videos and voice messages from Android to iPhone via Apple’s Move to iOS app. Prior to this expansion, users only had the option to transfer chats from iPhone to Android. The ability to transfer WhatsApp data from Android to iPhone is rolling out now in beta.

Although it’s been easy to transfer WhatsApp data from one iPhone to another, or from one Android to another, users have had to find difficult workarounds when moving from Android to iPhone. The new tool will solve this problem and make it a lot easier to make the switch..