WhatsApp Quietly Rolls Out View Once Screenshot Blocking

Many of WhatsApp’s users might be familiar with View Once, the popular messaging app’s privacy tool that lets you send photos and videos to others that automatically disappear after being viewed. To our surprise, WhatsApp has quietly rolled out a new feature that bolsters users’ digital privacy by blocking the ability for people to take screenshots of View Once media — it was recently spotted by WABetaInfo as being under development.

Despite no official announcement from the company yet, one of our writers got a pop-up announcement on the app when trying to use View Once, stating that the feature is getting more private by blocking screenshots. This can be confirmed on WhatsApp’s FAQ page for the privacy tool, stating that messages are protected with screenshot blocking.

In our testing, attempting to take a screenshot of a View Once on an iPhone will result in an image with a page that says “Screenshot Blocked” instead of the image displayed. On the other hand, doing the same thing on an Android device will result in the app preventing the phone from taking a screenshot entirely.

WhatsApp warns that if the person on the other end is using an older version of the app, they could still take a screenshot of your View Once media. However, this is apparently a temporary loophole as the blocking feature is still being tested, with the company promising that nobody will be able to take screenshots of the temporary images in the future.

Interestingly, you won’t get a notification if somebody attempts to take a screenshot unlike what happens on Snapchat. Of course, the Meta-owned platform warns that people could still use a second device to take a picture of the View Once media on their screen, so you should still only send pictures only to people you trust.

Screenshot blocking for WhatsApp was first teased by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg way back in August but no clear timeline was given for its launch. It’s unclear if the new privacy feature is rolling out to all users worldwide or if it’s still only available to a select few, but it has worked with every account we’ve tried so far.

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