WhatsApp is working on giving users the option to adjust the visibility of their "Last Seen" status on a contact-by-contact basis, according to a new report from forthcoming-feature specialist WABetaInfo.
As regular WhatsApp users will know, the "Last Seen" status of a contact sits atop the conversation thread, informing you when that contact last opened and was active on the app.
Currently, you can disable your "Last Seen" status so that other contacts can't see when you were last online, but the setting's options are limited to "Everyone," "My Contacts," and "Nobody," and there's no way to make exceptions for individual contacts.
However, that looks set to change, based on options unearthed by WABetaInfo in a beta version of WhatsApp. In the Privacy settings, the messaging platform is adding the option "My Contacts Except..." which will let you select specific contacts so that they don't see when the last time was that you were active on the messaging network.
Although it's worth noting that if you disable your last seen status for specific contacts, you won't be able to see theirs either.
The new "My Contacts Except..." option is also evident in the privacy settings for a user's profile picture and "About" information, indicating WhatsApp's intention to bring more granular settings to the app's privacy options as a whole.
As usual, it's unclear when the new options will go live, but given they were discovered on iOS, expect them to appear on iPhone first, with the Android version to follow.
