In August of last year, WhatsApp introduced the Communities feature, which allows users to create “megagroups” that contain multiple WhatsApp groups, including a dedicated group for announcements. With a limit of 50 groups in total and 5,000 people in the announcements group, this feature is aimed at businesses and educational institutions, enabling them to coordinate various work teams, departments, or classes.
The Communities feature has received several updates in recent months, including one that gives administrators the ability to decide who can join their chats through an invitation link or from another community. Another update allows community users to search for a contact’s name to see if they belong to any shared groups.
Now, WhatsApp has updated Communities to allow users to hide their phone numbers from other participants in a community. While names and phone numbers are hidden by default for community chat members (except for administrators), reacting to a message with an emoji reveals your data to the rest of the users, which many consider a privacy concern.
According to WABetaInfo, the new privacy feature added to Communities, called “Phone Number Privacy,” allows participants in a community to hide their phone numbers at all times and under any circumstances. This feature can be enabled or disabled from the community’s information menu (where the participant list is displayed).
However, just as before, community administrators will still be able to see your phone number regardless of your settings. Additionally, this feature is only available in Communities, so regular groups will continue to display the phone numbers of all members without the option to hide them.
Currently, the privacy feature is only available in the beta version of WhatsApp. However, it is expected to be released soon in stable versions, as is typically the case with other features tested in beta versions.
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