New version of the app WhatsAppThe mobile-oriented instant messaging service owned by Meta (formerly Facebook’s parent company) has incorporated a small innovation to make it harder for malicious actors: the inability to take a screenshot of a profile.

Not being able to take a profile screenshot isn’t anything surprising, but rather a feature that was announced a few weeks ago. Although it may not seem so due to the image of the parent company, the reality is that WhatsApp has introduced various features over the years to strengthen the security and privacy of its users, such as the default activation of extreme encryption. a feature that is not enabled in Telegram by default.

The rate against profile picture screenshots is not hard to guess and basically consists of: If the user tries to take a screenshot of the profile of one of the contacts they have in the app, a black image is returned or a warning is displayed which means it is not possible to capture the screen from there.

WhatsApp prevents you from taking a screenshot of your profile. Source: Android Police.

However, from what I was able to prove, Yes, it is possible to take a screenshot of a contact’s profile, where the phone number and call, video and search options are displayed, among other things. This means you can still take a screenshot of the user’s profile, but at the cost of making it look smaller. With the tools that exist today, it’s relatively easy to do a much higher resolution reconstruction, not to mention possible take a picture of your smartphone screen with another device.

An interesting fact is that Meta has not officially announced the deployment of the feature that prevents taking a screenshot of the profile, so we assume that it is still in the experimental phase. Despite that, it’s enabled by default and there’s no way to disable it, so there’s a good chance it’ll stay there and be announced when the company gets the all clear, or it could end up being pulled when they see the holes it presents.

In short, the latest privacy enforcement measure introduced by WhatsApp is aimed at users with little knowledge or insight rather than fighting people who are persistent privacy infringers.