Enhanced Privacy in Community Chats: WhatsApp Ensures Complete Phone Number Confidentiality
anasalam1989 WhatsApp, the renowned messaging app, continues its efforts to bolster user privacy within its communities. Following the recent announcement of an updated interface for the communities tab, WhatsApp is now introducing a novel phone number privacy feature exclusively for community members.
The quietly tested phone number privacy feature is now being rolled out to a broader user base, aiming to safeguard the phone numbers of community members from being exposed to other participants. While the participants’ list is already hidden within the community announcement group, users faced challenges in reacting to messages without revealing their phone numbers. This new feature resolves this issue by allowing users to add reactions to messages while keeping their phone numbers concealed.
To enable this enhanced privacy feature, users can navigate to the community announcement group info and select the “phone number privacy” option. Upon activation, participants are informed that their phone numbers will only be visible to community administrators and contacts who have saved their numbers. Consequently, other participants in the community will not have access to their complete phone numbers during conversations. Notably, this feature solely applies to community members, and the phone number of the community administrator remains visible.
This phone number privacy feature delivers significant advantages in terms of user anonymity and confidentiality. Community members can now interact with the community announcement group without revealing their full phone numbers when reacting to messages. While some users already had limited reaction capabilities, this new feature expands the functionality further. Moreover, WhatsApp plans to extend the phone number privacy feature to other groups in the future. When privately contacting a community member with a concealed phone number, users will have the option to send a request for sharing their phone numbers.
Currently, the phone number privacy feature is accessible to beta testers who have installed the latest WhatsApp update on Android and iOS devices. The feature will be progressively rolled out to a wider user base in the forthcoming days. In addition to this privacy feature, WhatsApp is actively developing other functionalities, including sticker suggestions, a user-friendly chat list filter, and high-quality video sharing, as part of its continuous commitment to enhancing the overall user experience.
