The company has confirmed this setting and is enabled for all. A reason why WhatsApp made this feature is that there are a growing number of third-party apps that let unknown people track others’ active status, which could be concerning.
WhatsApp Latest Privacy Feature
For long WhatsApp was criticized for various privacy and security issues. As it’s gradually losing the community’s faith and trust, the Meta-owned platform has started bringing a plethora of privacy features to keep users in the ecosystem. And the latest one among them is the hiding of the last seen status of a contact, to someone unknown or a contact who hasn’t chatted with him yet. In its latest version 2.21.25.19 for both Android and iOS clients, WhatsApp added this support to bar any unknown or an inactive contact, to view the last seen or online status of a person. This has been concerning, as we see a growing number of third-party apps online that can tweak settings to let unknown people see the last seen and online status of a WhatsApp user. So barring them is a good thing, as it doesn’t lead to anything harmful in the long run. This has been confirmed by the WhatsApp support team when asked by WaBetaInfo. WhatsApp also assured that introducing this feature won’t change any experience with the old (already chatted) contacts, and can continue as usual. But if you’re still not able to see the last seen or online status of a person, that’s because that contact has enabled a specific privacy setting of “My Contacts Except“. This support is yet to roll out widely but is available for some testers in Android and iOS beta versions.
