WhatsApp Adding This New Phone Number Privacy Feature For Communities: All Details

The Meta-owned popular messaging application WhatsApp is reportedly introducing a new privacy feature for community members, which restricts your phone number visibility only to those who have saved you as a contact. The feature is available after installing the most recent update of WhatsApp for iOS and Android.

“This feature, called “phone number privacy”, ensures that your phone number is always hidden from other members of the community. Thanks to this feature, the phone number will remain hidden even when adding a reaction to a message, the WABetaInfo reported.

According to the WABetaInfo, there may be a new option located in the community announcement group info called “phone number privacy”. The feature prompts an alert by informing users that their phone number is only visible to community admins and other people who have saved them as a contact.

This feature will hide your phone number so all other participants won’t be able to see your full phone number in the conversation. It is important to Note that this feature is limited to community members and the community admin’s phone number is always visible.

This feature introduces a major advantage in terms of privacy as users will be able to interact with the community announcement group in complete anonymity, for example, by adding a reaction to a message. In this situation, the full phone number won’t be visible.

The report also suggests that, in the future, the phone number privacy feature will also be extended to other groups. In addition, in case you are able to privately contact a community member whose phone number is hidden, you will have the option to send them a request so that they can choose to share their phone number with you.

The new phone number privacy feature for communities is available to some beta testers that install the latest WhatsApp for Android update from the Google Play Store and WhatsApp for iOS from the App Store and the TestFlight app, and it is rolling out to even more people over the coming days, the report said.