WhatsApp has launched an additional layer of privateness known as Superior Chat Privateness that enables customers to dam contributors from sharing the contents of a dialog in conventional chats and teams.
“This new setting out there in each chats and teams helps stop others from taking content material exterior of WhatsApp for when you might have considered trying further privateness,” WhatsApp mentioned in an announcement.
The optionally available function, when enabled, prevents others from exporting chats, auto-downloading media to their cellphone, and utilizing messages for synthetic intelligence (AI) options. Nevertheless, it is price noting customers can nonetheless take particular person screenshots, or manually obtain the media.
The favored messaging service mentioned the function is “greatest used” when participating in delicate conversations with teams the place it is doable that customers could not know everybody intently.
The function, WhatsApp mentioned, is rolling to all customers who’re on the most recent model of WhatsApp.
The disclosure comes because the European Fee fined Meta €200 million ($227 million) for breaching the Digital Markets Act (DMA) by illegally requiring customers to go for a “pay or consent” mannequin and never providing a much less customized however equal different for individuals who don’t consent.
“This mannequin just isn’t compliant with the DMA, because it didn’t give customers the required particular option to go for a service that makes use of much less of their private information however is in any other case equal to the ‘personalised adverts’ service,” the Fee mentioned.
“Meta’s mannequin additionally didn’t enable customers to train their proper to freely consent to the mixture of their private information.”
The E.U. watchdog mentioned it is at the moment assessing a brand new model of the free customized adverts mannequin that Meta launched in November 2024 and which “allegedly makes use of much less private information to show ads.”
It is price noting that the €200 million nice is just for the interval between March 2024, when the DMA took impact, and November 2024, that means the corporate might face extra penalties if its new system can also be discovered to be non-compliant.
Meta has responded to the fines by stating that the Fee is “trying to handicap profitable American companies whereas permitting Chinese language and European firms to function beneath totally different requirements.”
“And by unfairly proscribing customized promoting the European Fee can also be hurting European companies and economies,” Joel Kaplan, Chief World Affairs Officer at Meta, mentioned.
