WhatsApp announces new features for additional privacy, security

Meta-owned WhatsApp always ensures privacy for its users and has announcednew security features to provide an additional layer ofprivacy, WaBetaInfo reported.

According to the app-tracking website, the new features include account protect, device verification, and automatic security codes — which would allow users to prevent unauthorised access to accounts and protect againstmobile device malware.

The features — named accountsecurity features — will be added to the app in the coming months. They will be released to everyone in the future.

WhatsApp announced these new features while highlighting the importance ofusing two-step verification and end-to-end encrypted backups. These can be turned on by the users themselves.

Account protect, which is a new feature, is very important as it would preventunauthorised attempts to move WhatsApp accounts to another device. This would stop hackers from trying to infiltrate the accounts.

Through this feature, users will be required to verify theiraccount from their old device before transferring it to a new device.

The second feature is device verification which would preventmobile device malware from using someone's WhatsApp account to sendunwanted messages.

"WhatsApp has added checks to authenticate user accounts in order to protect them if their device is compromised," the app tracker said.

The third feature is called security codes which would make the whole verification process easier and more accessible for users. The process would have a key transparency "that allows users to automatically verify their secure connection when clicking on the encryption tab".

These features will be released on both Android and iOS. They might be available for some beta testers soon.

Kevin Lewi, who is a research scientist at Meta, shared in a Twitter thread that the messaging app has announced its plans to deploy key transparency.

Lewi said that WhatsApp cares about the privacy of its users, adding that "we want to simultaneously keep a publicly-auditable log, but in a privacy-preserving way so that nothing is exposed - not even any metadata such as patterns of how often individuals update keys."