Privacy has been an unchanging concern for Meta projects, including WhatsApp, in recent years. The new addition to WhatsApp, now reported to be in testing, is called granular privacy controls. Under it, you can prevent some of your contacts from viewing your statuses and profile without completely removing or blocking them.

Granular privacy controls will let users regulate who can access their public information. WhatsApp incorporates fewer social media elements than, say, Telegram, remaining mostly a private messenger as it was initially designed. Still, there is a large public part of WhatsApp activity which includes your username, profile picture, and statuses. Anyone who has your number in their phonebook can access this data.

But this will change with introducing granular controls. If you don’t want certain contacts to see when you ware online last, as well as read your profile and see pictures, you can limit the access for them. The access is separate for your Last Seen, Profile Photo, and About. In addition to traditional options (Everyone, My Contacts, and Nobody), now you will have “My Contacts Except”. The list of those banned to see a certain part of your profile can be edited separately too.

This makes privacy control on WhatsApp even finer. For example, if you want to disappear for someone you know for long, you can just hide your Last Seen from them, leaving the rest accessible. If you change your profile photo to boast your news (marriage, relationship, moving, surgery, etc.) to a certain group of your WhatsApp contacts, you can add everyone outside that group to “Except”.

It’s not clear when this new control mode will be available to all WhatsApp users. Do you welcome this addition? Do you already know how you would use it? Share your impressions with us in the comments if you please!