Last year, WhatsApp introduced Chat Lock, a neat consumer-focused feature that meant you could ensure your chats stayed private, even if someone has access to your phone, say. But it’s had a big limitation: it’s restricted to your primary device only. But the good news is, that’s changing.
Now, according to WABetaInfo, the system is about to get better. Chat Lock was designed so that you could hide chats easily, important if you were planning a surprise birthday party for someone in your family, essential if there were more serious reasons you needed to keep some chats confidential from the people around you.
Chat Lock works well because it not only locks the chats so nobody else can read them on your device, it also hides them away so the chats don’t even exist as far as others are concerned.
It has plenty of thoughtful elements: when a new message in a locked chat comes in, the notification says, “WhatsApp: 1 new message” and nothing more. Media is kept private, too, so to save stuff to your phone, you need to turn chat lock off.
A later modification meant that you could choose to unlock the chats with a special secret code instead of your phone’s passcode or biometrics to keep things more discreet still.
But the limitation to your primary device only meant that hidden chats were still visible on linked devices, such as a Mac, for instance. This is something of a risk and has attracted numerous .
The latest development suggests that this limitation could be overturned soon, with a message inviting users to set up a secret code, saying, “To open locked chats on this device, you first need to create a secret code. On your primary phone, go to Chat lock settings and select Secret code.”
WABetaInfo explains how it works: “This secret code can be configured from the primary phone within the chat lock settings by selecting the secret code option. After configuring the secret code, locked chats will disappear from the chats list and can only be accessed via this privacy feature on linked devices.”
This looks slated to appear in a future update, though there’s no clarity yet on when that might be.
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