WhatsApp has implemented a feature that prevents users from taking screenshots of profile pictures

WhatsApp has added a new layer of privacy to its users, ensuring that their profile picture is not misused by taking screenshots. WhatsApp has already prevented people from taking screenshots of one-view photos or videos, and now the same feature has been rolled out to your photos in the messaging app as well.

Taking a screenshot is a serious invasion of a person’s privacy, and in most cases you won’t even notice when someone does that to your photo. But if this happens with your profile picture on WhatsApp, the platform will not give you a warning about the action, but make sure that the resulting screenshot of the picture is blank and they will only see a black screen in front of them.

Here’s what some have noticed about the new feature, which hasn’t rolled out to everyone yet, but we expect it to in the next few days or even weeks. As we noticed in the recent WhatsApp Android beta version 2.24.4.25, the messaging app notifies the owner with a message that says “Unable to take screenshot due to app restrictions.”

We could independently verify this tool and it works. After this, we noticed that you can take a screenshot of the profile picture when you click on a contact in the chat window. WhatsApp doesn’t allow people to change the settings of this privacy feature so you don’t turn it off, which is never ideal for a person’s privacy. Facebook also has a similar tool called Profile Picture Guard that prevents others from taking a screenshot of a photo.

The fact that the blocking of the screenshot tool is now available to a wider user base suggests that an official release is not far off. We are not sure if and when iPhone users can expect the feature to be enabled on their profile. This feature gives WhatsApp a big advantage over its competitors like Signal and Telegram, which do not have this tool.