If you are a WhatsApp user, you might be well aware of its ‘Groups’ feature, which essentially allows you to bring together your contacts, be it your family members, friends, co-workers etc., in a single place to make it easy for you to contact multiple contacts at once.
Although the feature is useful and comes in handy when trying to contact multiple people or re-connecting with old acquaintances, some people do not like the freedom that people possess, which allows them to create a group and add any person in it without their consent.
To overcome this, WhatsApp has today announced the roll-out of a new option that would allow users to prevent other people from adding them into groups. With the new update, starting to roll-out today for some, users will get three options:
- ‘Everyone’ – allows anyone to add you to groups,
- ‘My contacts’ – only the contacts present on your device can add you to groups, and
- ‘Nobody’ – as soon as someone adds you to groups, you will have the option to approve or decline the request, under the ‘Groups’ settings.
With the ‘Nobody’ option, the person wanting to add you to a group will be prompted to send a private invite to you through personal chat. And you, one the other hand, will have a period of three days to either accept or decline the request before it expires.
In order to access these settings, you need to open WhatsApp and go into Account > Privacy > Groups and select the desired option from the list. The new feature will start rolling out to some WhatsApp users starting today and might take a week before it is available to the masses worldwide. It is interesting to see WhatsApp taking user privacy seriously and providing them with the control to manage their group presence. So go ahead and change the settings and stop people from adding you to annoying groups.
