WhatsApp is launching three new privateness options alongside a billboard and tv promoting marketing campaign throughout the UK.
The new WhatsApp privateness options will permit folks to exit group chats with out notifying everybody, to manage who can see when they’re on-line and to stop screenshots of auto-deleting “View Once” messages.
They are described as methods to maintain customers’ messages as “secure as face-to-face conversations” by Meta chief government Mark Zuckerberg and are being launched alongside a world promoting marketing campaign beginning within the UK and India.
When folks on WhatsApp go away group chats at current, your complete chat receives a notification that they’ve exited, probably drawing undesirable consideration. The firm says now solely directors will obtain a notification.
The app additionally broadcasts to all contacts of a consumer when they’re on-line and have the app open, one thing that customers will be capable to select to share.
WhatsApp had beforehand warned customers to “only send photos or videos with ‘View Once’ media enabled to trusted individuals” because it was potential to take a screenshot or display screen recording of the media earlier than it disappeared.
Some noticed the transfer as one other function that WhatsApp copied from Snapchat after the introduction of statuses in 2017.
In his publish asserting the brand new WhatsApp updates, Mr Zuckerberg wrote: “We’ll keep building new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”
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The promoting marketing campaign, which is able to embrace a billboard on Wandsworth Roundabout in southwest London, comes as Meta has confronted a rising variety of criticisms about how its privateness options could possibly be abused by folks looking for to evade legislation enforcement.
Last month two senior technical administrators at GCHQ, the UK’s cyber intelligence company, printed a paper analysing how social media platforms expose kids to sexual abuse on-line.
Earlier this yr a government-funded promoting marketing campaign known as No Place To Hide aimed to focus on the challenges that end-to-end encrypted messaging posed to police when investigating crimes involving baby sexual abuse.
Meta has repeatedly acknowledged that it believes end-to-end encryption is the one means to make sure that customers are capable of safely message one another and not using a third get together eavesdropping on them.
Mr Zuckerberg introduced his plans to rework privateness on the platform within the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal again in 2019 by making it unimaginable for Meta itself to learn the content material of messages that customers share, just like the way it can not entry the content material of WhatsApp messages.
However, these modifications haven’t but been carried out throughout its different platforms amid issues that they might blind legislation enforcement to incidents of kid grooming and abuse over its platforms, and will provoke a secret authorities injunction.
Source: information.sky.com”