WhatsApp is always trying to make communities better. WhatsApp recently introduced new features for the communities section. They added a new feature that lets community members keep their phone numbers private. This feature is available for WhatsApp Android and IOS devices.
WhatsApp is now testing a new community feature that adds more privacy to your contact when you join the community. This feature, called “phone number privacy,” ensures that your phone number is always hidden from other community members. When you join a community, the list of participants is hidden in the community announcement group. The community users cannot interact with the announcement groups by using message reactions because doing so world real their phone number. In this new feature, when you add a reaction to a message, your phone number will remain hidden. This feature is currently available for a small group of users and will be available for all users in the upcoming week.
What’s new in the latest version
You might find a new option called phone number privacy in the community announcement group. This feature shows many messages to users and tells them their phone number is only visible to community admins who save their number in the contact list. Apart from admins, no one can access their phone numbers. Your phone number will be hidden, and another participant in the community won’t be able to see your complete phone number during the conversation. This feature is only available for community members, and the phone number is only visible for admins.
The new feature brings significant privacy advantages where users can join and interact with a community announcement group without revealing their identity. For example, when adding a reaction to the message, the phone number and other information will not be visible to others. This phone number privacy feature can also be extended to other groups, and if you can privately contact community members whose numbers are hidden, send them a request to share their phone numbers with you and give them a choice.
This feature is only available for community users. The message is only visible to community advance. Still, this feature is currently accessible by some small group of Beta testers who install the latest WhatsApp for Android from the Google Play Store and WhatsApp for iOS from the App Store. The test flight app and this feature will be completely accessible for all worldwide users in the upcoming days.