The WhatsApp programmers have secretly made a drastic change.
What users need to know now.
Mountain View - Central functions of the popular WhatsApp * messenger service are constantly being changed.
WhatsApp recently secretly redesigned an important feature.
As the industry
portal Techbook
reported, the blue
ticks
that are displayed under voice messages are at the center of the change.
From now on, these are only visible if both chat partners have activated a certain setting.
WhatsApp secretly changes important functions
One or the other should have already noticed: In order to continue to see the blue check mark, i.e. the read confirmation, under voice messages, both WhatsApp users must now have activated the read confirmation.
This setting can be selected under the Data Protection tab.
If one of the two chat partners decides to deactivate the read receipt, the blue tick will no longer appear.
Only the two gray ticks are displayed, which indicate that the message has been sent and reached the recipient.
WhatsApp * apparently introduced this change clandestinely on March 11, 2021.
Those who do without the read receipt for privacy reasons will probably no longer see the two ticks in the future.
It has not yet been clarified whether this change is permanent or whether it is just a test.
In any case, this step is the logical continuation of the read receipt.
The separation of read receipts into speech and text has not been consistent so far.
But because the protection of privacy is becoming ever more secure, this change could be very popular with WhatsApp users.
Stiftung Warentest recommends settings to protect privacy
In order to better protect his privacy and data, Stiftung Warentest recommends WhatsApp users to make some settings.
After downloading WhatsApp, each new user must first provide a mobile phone number, name and, if necessary, a profile picture.
What is unfortunately not immediately clear: Anyone who has your phone number can also see your profile picture.
To prevent this, an extra setting is required.
To do this, you have to call up the settings in the app.
To do this, open the app and select the three dots in the upper right corner.
Then first select the Account tab and then Data Protection.
You have a number of choices below.
To limit the visibility of your profile picture, select the Profile picture option.
Now you can decide whether everyone, your contacts or nobody sees your profile picture.
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phf
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* Merkur.de is part of IPPEN.MEDIA.
List of rubric lists: © Catherine Waibel / dpa
