RUMOR:
A viral social media post claiming that WhatsApp has changed its privacy settings for groups overnight is making the rounds via the WhatApp platform this morning. The message comes days after the social media giant, Facebook, had a day-long outage that impacted all of its platforms including WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook.
FALSE: As with most of these rumors, this one is not true and this is not the first time that it has been in circulation either. CMR found evidence of this back in May 2021. The privacy changes were made years ago and are nothing new and were announced by WhatsApp in November 2019. WhatsApp issued a statement indicating that it was giving people the option to decide who could invite them to a group.
This rumor emphasizes that the changes were made “last night” and without notice to users and also implies that it is harmful to users of the popular messaging application. It was not secretly done as WhatsApp announced it. The everyone setting is the default and can have some implications for privacy and spam so it may not be a bad idea to make the changes in any event.
This gives users the option to optimize their privacy settings.
Once again, don’t believe everything that gets shared around or forwarded in social media groups.
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