A few days ago, WhatsApp announced a new feature in its application aimed at reducing interruptions for new members in a group. In this latest feature, the admins of a particular group can choose to send recent messages to new members so that they can get about the gist of the past conversations that had taken place in that group, so that there wouldn’t be any scope for confusion.
This feature is very helpful and eliminates the need for manually forwarding the older messages. But WhatsApp has stated that the decision to share the message history entirely depends on the Admin. “When you add someone new to a group chat, you’ll see an option to send recent messages to them, from 25 up to 100 maximum. This keeps things simple, ensuring new members only need to read the most relevant, recent context, and the whole group can easily see the messages that have been shared, the company emphasized in a blogpost.
It has also been stated that, to maintain transparency, everyone in the group will be notified when the message history is sent, as indicated by clear timestamps and the sender’s information. Apart from this, the users will be easily able to visually distinguish between the message history and regular messages.
The company claims that this feature is also built with privacy in mind and does not weaken its encryption standards. The group message history will stay end-to-end encrypted, ensuring that only the participants can access those messages safely. Group Message History is available on both Android and IOS versions of WhatsApp. And users can avail it by updating the app to its latest version.
This article is authored by Yoga Aditya, a student of Loyola College, interning at Deccan Chronicle, Secunderabad