WhatsApp beta reveals Restricted Chat: sensitive chats stay on your main phone

WABetaInfo reports that Meta has surfaced Restricted Chat in the WhatsApp beta for Android. The feature is still in development, and the idea is pretty simple: selected one-to-one and group chats would stay on your main phone instead of syncing to linked devices such as WhatsApp Web, the desktop apps, or a secondary phone.

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Turn it on for a specific chat, whether that’s a private thread or a group, and that conversation wouldn’t show up on those linked devices. Per WABetaInfo, that gives you another privacy control on top of end-to-end encryption.

From the look of it, this seems to build on Advanced Chat Privacy rather than replace it. So you could tighten things up only where you want to, keep existing protections like blocked chat exports and no automatic media saving, and add one more restriction by deciding where a chat can even be opened.

If you use WhatsApp for sensitive conversations, this looks like the kind of feature worth paying attention to if it actually ships. Meta has been adding stronger protections for higher-risk users, including journalists and activists, though the metadata issue still hasn’t gone away: who you contact and when can still be a concern for WhatsApp’s 2.9 billion users, by Meta’s own numbers.

Right now, though, WABetaInfo has only spotted Restricted Chat in the Android beta. You can’t download it or try it yet, there’s no public release date, and the finished version could still change, even if the feature does sound useful for cutting down risk on shared computers, linked devices, weaker setups, or secondary phones.

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