Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Meta, posted a post on his Facebook at around midnight on Tuesday, Malaysia time, officially announcing that the messaging app WhatsApp will launch the Chat Lock function to protect user privacy better. It is reported that the new function of Chat Lock allows users to set the specified contact or group chat conversation as “Lock”. Then, when the relevant conversation is added to the locked chat list, it can only be read with the user’s fingerprint or password, and no one else can access it.
This feature provides additional privacy for sensitive chat content, allowing users to protect their privacy by preventing others from reading their messages. This feature also helps keep multimedia private, ensuring that media files such as photos and videos sent in locked chats are not automatically saved to your device’s gallery.
Under this new feature, locked conversations are moved out of the inbox and put into their folder, which can only be accessed through the user’s device password or biometric information such as fingerprints. This action also automatically hides the contents of the conversation from notifications.
Meta said that in the coming months, more options would be added for conversation locking, including locking conversations on companion devices and creating custom passwords for users’ conversations, allowing users to use unique passwords different from their phone passwords.
