WhatsApp has never been on the list of instant messaging services that are considered to be the most privacy-friendly. This is logical and we have already commented on it on previous occasions, and it is the case that for many years, probably due to the carelessness of being the leading service in its market, those responsible have hardly worked to provide it with new features, while its main competitors, who stepped on the gas in this sense, not only in terms of privacy, but also by adding new (and in many cases expected) features. A few years ago, however, this began to change significantly..

The most recent example of this can be found in the deployment a few weeks ago of the expected “companion mode”, which is the name Meta gave to the feature that finally allows the use of the same WhatsApp account in two or more smartphones, thus completing the synchronization function on different devices, launched in November 2021. We recently learned that the company is testing a mode of direct transmission (without traversing the cloud) of history between network devices locally, which is also testing the transcription of audio notes, which has deployed a beta version for the WhatsApp web, and that there is already a beta version for Wear OS. They sure work hard.

These new features include At the beginning of last month, we informed you about a feature that they are starting to test, and this would make it possible to protect certain conversations from the eyes of others, either with a password or the biometric identification system of the device on which we use the service. The level of privacy provided by a feature like this undoubtedly boosts the overall rating of the service by many whole numbers.

Well, after only a little over a month has passed since this feature was discovered, it’s official for the first time in tests. As we can read on the official Meta blog, WhatsApp has already started rolling out the Chat Lock feature that allows you to protect your conversations. As we can read in the said publication, from now on users will have a folder where they can save the conversations they want to protect.

In this first phase of implementation, it appears that Chat Lock will use the PIN configured on the device we use WhatsApp on, but future plans include the option use a separate keyso even if someone has access to the content of our devices, they won’t be able to access those conversations unless they have a specific unlock key for them.

Additionally, how can we read when the conversation is in the said folder other information about it will not appear in notifications (such as username and message content). Admittedly, at this point, they seem to have done a good job, something worth celebrating.