How to change your privacy settings

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You can adjust your privacy settings to control who can see your information and contact you. By default, WhatsApp sets your privacy settings to:
  • Any user can see your profile photo, read receipts, and when you’re online.
  • Your contacts can see your status updates, about information, and when you were last seen.
  • Any users can add you to groups or mention you in a status.
  • The default message timer for disappearing messages is turned off.
  • Unknown callers will be able to call you.
Note:
  • Users you’ve saved as a contact or who you’ve messaged before can see your last seen and online.
  • When someone reshares your status from a status mention, they can edit and reshare the content of your status to their own audience. Your name, profile information and phone number are not displayed in the reshared status. Learn more about status mentions.

Change privacy settings

To change who can see your last seen and online, profile photo, about information, status updates or add you to groups:
  1. Click Settings > Privacy.
  2. Click the privacy setting you’d like to change.
  3. Click Everyone, My contacts, My contacts except…, or Nobody.
In your privacy settings, you can also change the following settings:
  1. Change your read receipts, learn more in this Help Center article.
  2. Set your disappearing messages on or off by default, learn more here.
  3. Silence unknown caller, learn more in this article.
  4. Turn off live location sharing, learn more in this article.
  5. Advanced settings, such as how to protect your IP address in calls, disable link previews, and the ability to block high volumes of unknown messages from unknown accounts.
Alternatively, you can change your privacy settings through privacy checkup. Learn more about privacy checkup in this article.

Privacy settings options

Select one of the following privacy setting options for who can see your last seen and online, profile photo, about, status, or who can add you to groups:
  • Everyone: All users can see your profile photo, about, status, or add you to groups.
  • My Contacts: Only contacts from your address book can see your last seen and online, profile photo, about, status, or add you to groups.
  • My Contacts Except…: Contacts from your address book, except those you exclude, can see your last seen and online, profile photo, about, status, or add you to groups.
  • Nobody: No one can see your last seen and online, profile photo, about, or status.

Note:

  • If you don't share your last seen or online, you can’t see other users’ last seen or online.
  • If you select Everyone in settings for last seen or online, only those you’ve called and messaged before, or who you’ve saved as a contact, can see your last seen and online.
  • If you turn off read receipts, you can’t see read receipts from other users. Read receipts are always sent for group chats.
  • If a contact turns off read receipts, you can’t see if they’ve viewed your status updates.
  • There is no way to hide your phone number when using WhatsApp. Your phone number will still be visible even if the recipient has not saved your number in their contact list.

Related resources

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