Stay safe on WhatsApp

REVISED EDITION

Everything you need to know about staying safe on WhatsApp

Privacy Settings for Last seen, Profile picture and About

Be sure that your privacy settings are set at least on My Contacts. It’s not a good practice to keep your profile picture public, especially in case of under age kids. Generally I recommend to set private every service you own, for example your Instagram profile too.

Sometimes one of our contacts (whether been hacked or safe) is the “leak”, so Nobody is the best option in case of Last seen. Probably your About can also be public, but obviously don’t post important information.

Very soon, it'll be possible to exclude specific contacts to see your Last Seen, Profile Picture and About. I'll announce it on WhatsApp Status once this is available.

Privacy Settings for Groups

This is the most important privacy setting, and it should be updated very often when you add a new contact in your address book. (However I happened to manage to get Nobody option in Groups and I am on it).

The best option to select is My Contacts Except… > Select All, and you have to repeat this operation every time you add a new contact. In this case when someone tries to add you in a group, you won’t be added in the group immediately, but you can receive an invite privately.

This is very important because any strangers might add you in bad groups that trigger WhatsApp servers in order to ban you. It is important to exclude all contacts because someone might steal or hack the account of your friends and add you in a suspicious group.

Privacy Settings for Status

You should always have the control over things you send to your status updates. By default, when you send a new status update, WhatsApp forwards it to all your contacts but, in some cases, you might want to exclude specific contacts using My Contacts Except….

In our opinion the best option you can select is Only Share With…, selecting your close friends.

Screenshot showing best privacy selections

Enable biometric authentication to lock WhatsApp

Your WhatsApp chats might contain important information about you and other people. Lock the app within WhatsApp Settings > Account > Privacy, if your device supports the feature. When you lock WhatsApp, any attempt to create a WhatsApp Web session will also be blocked if the user doesn’t confirm his identity using the biometric authentication.

WhatsApp can end certain groups without any prior intimation

Maybe you didn’t know but WhatsApp has the ability to end specific groups. Seen that WhatsApp cannot see their content, because messages, media and calls are end-to-end encrypted, the moderation team uses an advanced machine learning technology based on recorded bad group information.

WhatsApp can automatically end groups when they are reported multiple times from different users, or the group has suspicious information such as illegal group names and descriptions: in this case, the group may be automatically or manually ended.

When a group is ended, its participants will no longer be able to send messages and read the chat history. And also, they cannot open the group info and read the list of other participants.

If you want a major layer of security, and you are a group admin, you should restrict who can change the group’s subject and description, selecting Only Admins within the group settings. This is because of the possibility that a user account may have been stolen (hacked) from malicious people, so they cannot change the group name using an illegal one. They may trigger WhatsApp systems to ban the entire group, for example making multiple participants admins and choosing illegal group information.

If you’re not the group admin, please explain to group admins why it’s important to protect the group.

Report contacts and groups

If you receive weird messages from unknown contacts or someone is disturbing you, you should report the contact from Contact Info. Note that, when you report a contact, you’re forwarding to WhatsApp the most recent messages received from the contact. If you have been added in a group from unknown contacts without any authorization, you can report the group from Group Info. This is important.

Be away from hoaxes and fake news

When you receive a message, you have to check its authenticity. The fact that you have received news on WhatsApp doesn’t mean it’s real. You can recognize hoaxes, phishing and fake news when they are forwarded messages and they ask to forward the message to your contacts, or when there are weird links.

WhatsApp highlights when a message contains a suspicious link, but a normal link might be also dangerous. When you have some doubt about the authenticity of a message, you can search it on the web or you can ask for help from your friends. Don’t hurry, take your time to be sure the message is real.

Sample of a fake website

He is your friend, but he might not be

Some people can steal WhatsApp accounts and they can contact you from the account of your friend, pretending to be him. If your friend is asking for something very confidential, for example money, credit card information, a 6-digit code, ask him for a voice message or call him to be sure it’s really your friend the person you’re chatting with.

The best way to protect your account is to enable the Two Step Verification within WhatsApp Settings, providing a valid mail address. Remember to protect your mail address too, enabling the Two-Step Verification for your mail service too, and you must use a strong password.

When someone tries to get access to your WhatsApp account, and you receive a SMS containing the 6-digit code: You should ignore those messages.

You don’t have to post screenshots of those messages on social networks, because they contain a link to validate the access to the WhatsApp account, and the 6-digit code. If you post a screenshot that contains the 6-digit code somewhere, and the person that wants to steal your WhatsApp account has a profile there, you’re giving away your account easily.

Contact support@whatsapp.com, reporting the situation. When you report it to WhatsApp, you’re protecting yourself from anything bad that might happen later, because if the person will be able to get your account and he will do bad things, at least you can tell to WhatsApp that you already notified them and they might not take any action against you, if what you’re saying is true.

You can send and revoke, but nothing is safe

If you believe that sending a confidential message or media is safe because you can easily delete the message for everyone, you’re using disappearing messages or you will send it as self-destructing media, you’re wrong.

People might save, screenshot or forward the message before you revoke it or before the message disappears/expires. You should always pay attention to things you send on WhatsApp.

WhatsApp can ban your WhatsApp account if...

WhatsApp Temporary Ban

WhatsApp can temporarily ban your account if too many people blocked you in a certain amount of time.
WhatsApp might temporarily ban your account if you’re using an unauthorized WhatsApp version. The apps that are installed from Play Store or App Store are authorized versions.
WhatsApp can temporarily ban your account if you create too many groups with people who don’t have your phone number saved in their address book.
WhatsApp can temporarily ban your account if you send too many messages to people who don’t have your phone number saved in their address book.
WhatsApp can temporarily ban your account if you send too many messages to a broadcast list.
WhatsApp could previously ban your account if you send the same message to too many people. This shouldn’t be active nowadays or it’s so rare, because WhatsApp allows forwarding a message to at most 5 contacts, in order to stop spreading fake news.

WhatsApp Permanent Bans

If the user has been temporarily banned several times, he or she might be permanently banned from using WhatsApp.
WhatsApp permanently bans accounts that execute bulk or automated actions: they totally violate their Terms of Service because those actions use WhatsApp services without any authorization. WhatsApp bans over 2.5 million accounts per month because of bulk and automated messages.
WhatsApp can permanently ban your account if the phone number associated has been used for suspicious actions. This check happens during the registration of the account.
WhatsApp permanently bans accounts that use their service intensively, for example if the account sends a lot of messages within a certain amount of time. Don’t worry, WhatsApp introduced a limit that’s really impossible to reach for a human. If an account reached the limit, it means it’s not a human but it’s an automated system.
WhatsApp permanently bans all accounts that receive several reports from other users.
WhatsApp permanently bans accounts having suspicious names in their group names. WhatsApp can view all group names and descriptions, in order to automatically ban all accounts that violate laws (but they aren’t collected for advertisement purposes and these details are not shared with their parent company, Facebook). This is to help WhatsApp to fight child exploitation.

WhatsApp advises that they might not issue a warning before banning any account (per their Terms of Service they may retain the right to ban you without any communication) but, if the user thinks his account was banned by mistake, he can email them so they will look into his case.

Thanks to WABetaInfo, most of the content here is learned from them.