WhatsApp

After months of testing on Android, Meta is bringing guest chats to beta testers on iOS and the web. Here’s how it will work.

WhatsApp has announced that preteens can now use its messaging platform via new parent-managed accounts that come with certain restrictions. Here are the details.

Meta is at last bringing scheduled messages to WhatsApp, delivering on one of the app’s most-requested features. Here’s how it is going to work.

Users will soon be able to mark messages as spoilers, so their content isn’t immediately visible to recipients. Here are the details.

WhatsApp just announced that Group Message History is rolling out now, which Meta says is one of its “most requested features.” Here are the details.

Both WhatsApp and Telegram have been blocked in Russia as the government tries to force people to use its unencrypted WeChat clone, Max. All messages sent and received in Max can be read by the government.

The government also blocked access to Facebook and Instagram, and designated parent company Meta as “an extremist organization” …

The feature is now starting to reach WhatsApp Web beta users, with a wider rollout expected for the coming weeks. Here’s how it works.

Both the founders of WhatsApp and current owner Meta state that the app uses end-to-end encryption, meaning that nobody outside the chat can access the content. A lawsuit claims that this isn’t true and that anyone inside Meta can get full access to all of the messages sent or received by any WhatsApp user.

Johns Hopkins University professor and cryptographer Matthew Green has weighed in with a blog post analyzing the claims and likely reality …

WhatsApp announced a pair of anti-spyware security improvements today, including a new ‘Strict Account Settings’ mode and behind-the-scenes changes to protect user data.

Meta has revealed that it plans to test paid subscriptions to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook – with multiple options apparently on the cards.

The company has so far only provided specifics on the paywalled features for Instagram, with no details yet available about its other services …

Following regulatory scrutiny, Meta has confirmed that the third-party LLM ban on WhatsApp won’t apply to users in Italy and Brazil. Here are the details.

WhatsApp has just announced its first new features of the year, with three upgrades launching for group chats. Here’s what’s new.

Now that WhatsApp is finally available as a proper app for the Apple Watch, Meta is working on a way to inform users when their account is paired with the accessory. The company is also working on a better chat, attachment, and storage management interface. Here are the details.

Update, 7:11 p.m. ET: A Meta representative reached out to 9to5Mac and provided the following statement:

“We are grateful to the University of Vienna researchers for their responsible partnership and diligence under our Bug Bounty program. This collaboration successfully identified a novel enumeration technique that surpassed our intended limits, allowing the researchers to scrape basic publicly available information. We had already been working on industry-leading anti-scraping systems, and this study was instrumental in stress-testing and confirming the immediate efficacy of these new defenses. Importantly, the researchers have securely deleted the data collected as part of the study, and we have found no evidence of malicious actors abusing this vector. As a reminder, user messages remained private and secure thanks to WhatsApp’s default end-to-end encryption, and no non-public data was accessible to the researchers.” 

A massive WhatsApp security flaw exposed the phone number of almost every user on the planet – despite the fact that parent company Meta had been alerted to the vulnerability way back in 2017.

Security researchers were able to use what they described as a “simple” exploit to extract a total of 3.5 billion phone numbers from the messaging service …

Users under a higher risk of being targeted by hacking attempts will soon have the option to enable an extra set of security features on WhatsApp. Here are the details.