Any sensitive chat messages that you’d rather not see in your WhatsApp conversations list can now be safely stored in a secret folder.

Chat messages are already end-to-end encrypted today, but what if someone picks up your phone and (accidentally) reads all your messages there, or sees an embarrassing notification? Anyone who occasionally uses WhatsApp for work should be careful.

Until now, because from now on you can create a secret safe with blocked chat messages on your smartphone. In this vault you can file conversations that you would rather not share with others. As soon as you have entered messages there, they are no longer displayed in the list. You can access the safe with a password or biometric data such as your fingerprint.

When you receive notifications of new messages, the content is automatically hidden. You can only read the contents after you have purposefully opened your vault. This is useful when you’re handing your phone to someone and a sensitive message has just arrived.

Blocking a chat is easy: tap the recipient’s name in a chat and select from the list chat lock. When you do this for the first time, you will be given the option to activate the fingerprint sensor if you are already using it on your smartphone today. After that, a new item will appear at the top of your conversation list: Blocked Chats.

Striking: the chat block only works on the device you have configured. Anyone who uses the desktop version of WhatsApp on the PC, the web version or WhatsApp on a second smartphone is out of luck. There, at least for the time being, everything is still open and open. WhatsApp is working on a solution to enable a secret vault there as well. As long as this is not possible, you have to expect that sensitive notifications will still get through on your PC, even if you have encrypted them on your smartphone.