If there’s one widely used privacy feature on WhatsApp, it’s definitely her. to hide the time of the last connection. For whatever reason or reasons, practically since its launch, we’ve all begun to see how the classic “Last” and the date and time of its last connection began to fade rapidly from the information of many of our usual contacts. And personally, I thought it worked because there are people who don’t care if they know about it (even if they use it to find out if I’m still alive, after a long time without contact), but generally no one cares if I’m joined at three in the afternoon or morning.

However, the nuance is that which is indicated by “some people” and when we ask what I would really like is to be able to make a selective adjustment, stating which people I want to access that information (and I access it if they share it with me), but leave this field blank for the rest of the world. And of course, like WhatsApp, this measure is two-way, meaning I don’t even see your connection data.

And there is good news in this regard, and one more good news. As we can read in WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is already testing a feature to selectively hide connection data. With this feature, which has so far been deployed in the beta versions of WhatsApp for Android and iOS, users can block it specifically for certain contacts by configuring this information to be shared with everyone.

It is, of course, a step in the right direction, but in my opinion it is formulated in the opposite direction, which implies a difference in philosophy in this respect. According to the WhatsApp model, by default the user shares and hides only when he deems it necessary, while in my opinion the correct model would be hidden and shared on demand only by default. Some kind of privacy feature with options Log in Y opt-out.

Be careful, this is not a critique of this WhatsApp feature, everything that is a step forward in privacy seems to me to be a step in the right direction and a success. Now that this is still a beta version, and therefore it is understandable that Meta, the owner of the service, must be open to feedback about it, I think that both WhatsApp and the remaining services have all the options for privacy and functions should be logged off, not the other way around. This simple paradigm shift would save them a lot of trouble.