WhatsApp has announced a new method to protect your personal conversations: Chat Lock. Chat messages can then only be read if they are unlocked with a password or biometric data. The messaging service will add more options to Chat Lock in the coming months.
WhatsApp announces Chat Lock, or Chat Lock, as the feature is called in its weblog.
This is how you activate Chat Lock.
You must first enable Chat Lock to take advantage of the new security feature. Before protecting a chat, you must set up device verification, which means you must provide a password, PIN, fingerprint or Face ID. Once you’ve done that, tap Chat Info > Chat Lock. Then choose ‘Lock this chat with fingerprint’ or ‘Lock this chat with Face ID’ and confirm with your fingerprint or face profile.
One-to-one messages and group messages protected with Chat Lock are removed from the Inbox and placed in their own folder. The messages in this folder can only be accessed with a fingerprint or Face ID. Notification content and affected contacts are hidden when chats are locked and calls are not locked.
You should take this into account when setting up Chat Lock.
It’s good to know that chats are only locked locally. In other words, if you have Chat Lock set up on your smartphone and you access WhatsApp from your laptop or desktop computer, the messages on linked devices will not be protected. If you back up your chat history, the locked chats will remain locked.
If you enable Chat Lock, the person you are chatting with will not know that you have activated this feature. To lock an archived chat, you must unarchive it. Only then is it possible to set up Chat Lock?
To view locked chats, go to the Chats tab and swipe down. There you will find the Locked Chats folder. To read or send messages, you need to unlock this folder. You use your fingerprint or facial profile for this.
WhatsApp will add more options in the coming months.
WhatsApp thinks Chat Lock is reasonable “for people who sometimes need to share their phone with a family member or for those times when someone else is holding your phone right when an extra special chat comes in.” You can, of course, also use the function if you care about your privacy: after all, nobody can read your private messages without your biometric data.
Finally, WhatsApp says it will add more options to Chat Lock “over the coming months.” Then you should think about locking for assistive devices and setting unique passwords for your chats. To secure your chat conversations, you don’t have to use the same password as the password of your mobile phone.
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