WhatsApp Introduces Phone Number Privacy Feature for Groups and Communities
According to reports, WhatsApp, the messaging app owned by Meta, is set to introduce a new privacy feature for its users. This feature will limit the visibility of your phone number to only those who have saved you as a contact. To access this feature, users need to install the latest update of WhatsApp on their iOS or Android devices.
“This feature, called ‘phone number privacy’, ensures that your phone number is always hidden from other community members. This feature keeps the phone number hidden even when a reaction is added to the message,” WABetaInfo reported.
According to WABetaInfo, there may be a new option called “phone number privacy” in the community notification group information. The feature prompts an alert by informing users that their phone number is only visible to community administrators and others who have saved them as a contact.
This feature hides your phone number so that all other participants cannot see your full phone number in the conversation. It is important to note that this feature is restricted to community members and the community admin phone number is always visible.
This feature brings a great advantage in terms of privacy, as users can interact with the community announcement group completely anonymously, for example by adding a reaction to a post. In this situation, the entire phone number is not displayed.
The report also suggests that in the future the phone number data protection feature will be extended to other groups as well. Additionally, if you are able to privately contact a community member whose phone number is hidden, you will have the option to send them a request to share their phone number with you.
Communities’ new phone number privacy feature is available to some beta testers who install the latest update for WhatsApp for Android from the Google Play Store and WhatsApp for iOS from the App Store and the TestFlight app, and is rolling out to even more users. in the coming days, the report said.
