WhatsApp gives you more ways to avoid annoying group chats

WhatsApp gives you more ways to avoid annoying group chats

Hi WhatsApp is giving you more ways to block people from adding you to group chats. Its updatedh privacy settings replace the original "nobody" option with a "my contacts except" choice that lets you prevent certain people or all of them, if you prefer from dragging you into a group. Your close friends and family can add you to a chat, for 

example, but a co-worker can't rope you into a sports discussion without your permission.

Like earlier, a chat administrator who doesn't have permission can still send a private invitation through an individual chat. The request will disappear after three days, so 

you can ignore it if you'd rather not respond.

The feature should be active now on Android and iOS. This is an acknowledgment that unwanted group invitations are still an issue, of course, but it's also part of an ongoing 

effort to fight fake news. There should be fewer opportunities for people to spread misinformation, at least to people who weren't already receptive to it.

Now, it seems that the company is finally starting to make some moves to change this. This morning, the company announced that it would start to roll out an update globally 

so that individuals can either block some or all people to keep them from adding them to Groups.

As per an update that should be making its way to you soon, you can now navigate to the privacy settings in the app to select who (if anyone) can add you to a Group, 

automatically. If you select anything other than “everyone” enabled to add you to groups, you will get notifications asking if you want to join first. (Picture here from 

WhatsApp’s blog post as it has not rolled out to me yet in London.)

Note: The feature still requires users to proactively navigate to their settings to turn it on. It doesn’t get turned on by default. You also still can’t block a group wholesale.

Some background and clarification here. You might recall that WhatsApp actually announced a version of this feature back in April that was more rudimentary: you could 

select Nobody, Everybody or Contacts (but not specific contacts) to add you to Groups. At the time, WhatsApp noted that the control would be rolled out worldwide. It turns 

out it never did: India was as far as it got.

(Indeed, the feature was launched just after it was revealed that Groups were being manipulated in India to influence political opinion, with hundreds of hoaxes being spread 

on the platform daily using Groups as the medium. That was giving WhatsApp bad press, and so the feature felt like an immediate response to that.)

Instead, WhatsApp quietly stopped talking about it, and people seemed to forget (Twitter and other social media has turned us into goldfish, slaves to the scroll).

Fast-forward to today, and now it seems that WhatsApp is renewing but also committing to getting this out. A spokesperson confirmed to me today that, this time, Groups 

control really will be coming to all users on both iOS and Android, worldwide.

“Based on feedback from users during our initial rollout, instead of the ‘Nobody’ option we are now providing a ‘My Contacts Except’ option,” WhatsApp notes in its blog 

post update today. “This allows you to choose to exclude specific contacts or ‘select all’. This update is rolling out to users around the world on the latest version of 

WhatsApp.”

WhatsApp dragging its feet here is not unusual. The app is not famous for making changes quickly: It took almost a year — actually, two years — for WhatsApp to really start 

to get down to business with services for businesses. And there are a number of other examples of how the company does not roll out features with speed (or haste). We’ve 

long heard rumors about how the company had an interest in rolling out money transfer and payment services for consumers. These have yet to materialize.

So what comes next? Hopefully, WhatsApp will make one further change, and that is to set Groups to a with-permission-only setting by default.

If you have to dig into the settings to change an action — which you will have to do with this update if you are added by someone who is in your contacts (however, if you’re 

added by a non-contact you get the prompt below) — then it’s not on by default. As with Facebook’s privacy settings, this essentially means that many could miss the ability 

to set their own boundaries.



Adding better controls for Groups might not sound like a huge feature to you until you’ve been at the coalface of the Groups morass.

At its lightest or most innocuous, you are being added by tangential work contacts to annoying business chats, or groups of over-chatty folks coalesced around a particular 


interest. A nuisance, but not really the end of the world.


But at its darkest, people can get harassed, fake news can be spread and you might get slammed with an offensive, shocking, disturbing image or two (or three). Given that 

the app is used by minors (as young as 13 in some markets, although I suspect many younger than this use it), other vulnerable people, and billions of others, Groups on 


WhatsApp need way better basic controls, usable by more than just those who read change-logs on app updates, or tech blogs.


Recently, WhatsApp introduced the ability to lock the app behind the user’s fingerprint as an extra security measure. Now, it’s introducing yet another privacy-centric feature that gives WhatsApp users around the world more control over who can and cannot add them to group chats. 

The feature allows users to select if everyone, all contacts, or specific contacts can add them to group chats. Initially, WhatsApp had an option for users to say nobody could add them to groups. But after some feedback, it decided to fold the functionality to block everyone into the “My contacts except…” option.


Related: WhatsApp will always have security issues, according to the founder of rival Telegram


People without the ability to add certain WhatsApp users to group chats can still send private invites to those users. The user then has three days to accept or decline the invite.


Once you receive the latest app update, you can enable this WhatsApp group chat privacy feature by heading to the app settings. Then navigate to Account>Privacy>Groups. Here, users can select who has the ability to add them to group chats.


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