WhatsApp has added a new layer of privacy for its users, ensuring that their profile picture is not misused by taking screenshots. WhatsApp has already stopped people from taking screenshots of one-view photos or videos, and now the same feature is being enabled for your photos on the messaging app as well.
Taking screenshots is a serious violation of a person’s privacy and in most cases you don’t even realize that someone does this to your photo. But if this happens to your profile picture on WhatsApp, the platform will not alert you about the action but will ensure that the resulting screenshot of the picture is blank and shows only a black screen in front of them.
This is what some people have noticed about the new feature, which is not available to everyone yet, but we expect it to be in the next few days or weeks. As we recently saw with WhatsApp Android beta version 2.24.4.25, the messaging app notifies the owner with a message saying, “Screenshot can’t be taken due to app restrictions.”
We can independently verify this tool and it works. Having said that, we noticed that you can take a screenshot of the profile picture when you click on a contact from the chat window. WhatsApp doesn’t give people the option to change the settings of this privacy feature so you don’t disable it, which is never an ideal thing for a person’s privacy. Facebook also has a similar tool called Profile Picture Guard which prevents others from taking screenshots of the photo.
The fact that Screenshot Tool Blocker is now available to a wider user base suggests that an official release is not far off. We are not sure whether iPhone users can expect this feature to be rolled out for their profiles or not. Having this feature will give WhatsApp a big advantage over its rivals like Signal and Telegram who do not have this tool.