Today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp is bringing three new privacy features to users, offering more control over individual and group conversations and added layers of protection when messaging.

If you’ve ever archived or muted a group chat after endless streams of unnecessary messages, one of these updates could be for you.

There’s something quite dramatic about exiting a WhatsApp group, whether the chat is relevant to you or not. On pressing the ‘Exit Group’ button, every single person in the chat will be notified to say you have left the group. More often than not, if you make the decision to leave a group, you may want to do so silently, without the dramatics of a group-wide notification. And now you can. According to updates from Meta today, users will be able to exit a group privately. Now, instead of notifying the full group when leaving, only the admins will be notified. This feature starts to roll out to all users this month. Wave goodbye to old WhatsApp groups for your kids’ schools, out-of-date hen or stag party groups and the neighbourhood summer party group you never wanted to be a part of in the first place.

Along with this, you can now also choose who can see when you’re online. According to Meta, “Seeing when friends or family are online helps us feel connected to one another, but we’ve all had times when we wanted to check our WhatsApp privately. For the times you want to keep your online presence private, we’re introducing the ability to select who can and can’t see when you’re online. This will start rolling out to all users this month.”

Finally, users can also activate screenshot blocking for View Once messages (a way of sending photos or media that disappear after the user views them) for an added layer of protection. This feature is still in testing stage and is due to be rolled out to users soon. 

Speaking about the updates, Meta Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg said: “We’ll keep building new ways to protect your messages and keep them as private and secure as face-to-face conversations.”