By Chisomo Phiri
The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Meta, the parent company of the popular messaging app, WhatsApp, Mark Zuckerberg, has on Monday announced a new update to the app called’Chat lock’ which will enable users to lock their conversations for private purposes.
Zuckerberg made an announcement of the new WhatsApp feature on his official Facebook page saying the new feature aims at making users’ chats more private
“New locked chats in WhatsApp make your conversations more private.
“They are hidden in a password protected folder and notifications will not show sender or message content,” he said.
But this has not pleased majority of the App users, saying the new feature will likely promote cheating among people most especially those in relationships and marriages.
*9 points to know about WhatApp’s ‘Chat Lock’:*
1.The feature will be available to users with the new app update.
2.As per Meta, this feature lets you protect your most intimate conversations with a password and secures them in a separate folder.
3.When someone messages you and you have that chat locked, the sender’s name and the content of the message will also be hidden.
4.When a WhatsApp chat is ‘locked,’ that conversation thread is taken out of a user’s inbox, and put behind a folder of its own. It also automatically hides the contents of that chat in notifications, too.
5.A user can lock a chat by tapping the name of a one-to-one or group and selecting the lock option.
6.The feature will be available to users with the new app update, on both Android and iOS devices.
7.To access a locked chat, a person can only use the password of their device, or alternatively, biometric authentication such as fingerprint.
8.As per Meta, the ability to lock a chat will be greatly beneficial for users who share their phones with family members from time to time.
9.In the coming months, more options will be added to Chat Lock, including locks for companion devices, as well as custom passwords for chats, so that a person can use a password different from that of their phone to unlock a conversation.
The new feature comes few months after the company announced another feature which enables usesr to connect WhatsApp in up to four devices to enhance accessibility.
