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WhatsApp working on option to let users hide ‘Last Seen’ from specific contacts

Popular messaging app WhatsApp is working to implement more privacy settings for its users. The company will soon add a new option to hide your “Last Seen” status from specific contacts, rather than having to hide it from everyone.

The feature was discovered by WABetaInfo and, at least at this point, it’s not available to WhatsApp users — not even in the beta version of the app. As explained by the website, WhatsApp shows other users whether you’re online or when you were last seen in the app. You can choose to show your status to everyone, only your friends, or to no one.

With this upcoming update, WhatsApp users will find a fourth option in the “Last Seen” status menu, which is “My Contacts Except.” As the name suggests, you can set exceptions to hide your status from specific users, but everyone else will still be able to see it.

This means that, if you didn’t want a specific contact could see your last seen, you had to set the privacy setting of your last seen to “Nobody”. Today WhatsApp is finally working to introduce another option called “My contacts except…”, so you can finally enable your last seen back, and you can disable it for specific contacts!

According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp will also implement the same option for privacy settings for who can see your profile picture and other information.

You can see “My contacts except” for last seen in this screenshot, but this also applies to other privacy settings as well, such as “profile picture” and “about”. Note that, if you disable your last seen for specific contacts, you won’t be able to see theirs.

It’s unclear when this feature will be available for everyone, but it will probably take a while since not even WhatsApp Beta users have access to this new option. Earlier this week, it was revealed that WhatsApp is also working to implement reactions to messages, similar to what iMessage, Instagram, and Twitter provide.

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Avatar for Filipe Espósito Filipe Espósito

Filipe Espósito is a Brazilian tech Journalist who started covering Apple news on iHelp BR with some exclusive scoops — including the reveal of the new Apple Watch Series 5 models in titanium and ceramic. He joined 9to5Mac to share even more tech news around the world.