WhatsApp tests letting you block people from exporting your chats

WhatsApp is testing a new “advanced chat privacy” option that lets you control whether others you’re chatting with can easily export your chats or automatically save media you send them, reports WABetaInfo. The feature appeared in a recent app beta on iOS, and WABetaInfo spotted the toggle in an Android beta on Friday as well.

The new advanced chat privacy toggle is found in the settings for both single and group chats, according to WABetaInfo. Once it’s turned on, it will keep individual users or those in a group chat from exporting the whole chat history outside WhatsApp. It will also keep images and videos in a thread from automatically saving to device galleries — it’s not clear from the article whether users can still manually save them, and Meta’s description of the feature in WABetaInfo’s screenshots doesn’t mention it.

When enabled in a group chat, everyone in the chat will be notified that the advanced chat privacy setting is on. The toggle also apparently turns off Meta AI, which can be used in chats to do things like answer questions or generate images.

As WABetaInfo notes, while the new option prevents entire chats from being exported, it’s still possible to forward individual messages or screenshot them if the setting is on, so it would slow down efforts to preserve your chats, but not stop them entirely. You can lock down your chats more with WhatsApp’s existing disappearing messages, which can be set to auto-delete after an amount of time you pick. The advanced chat privacy setting is only available in beta for now, and there’s no indication of when it will get a wider rollout.