Regardless of who it weighs, WhatsApp is and will continue to be the leading messaging platform in the world, well at least outside the United States, where it is hardly used, something that is especially striking as it belongs to an American company. Being the most used application, surely we would all like to know tricks of it such as hide your WhatsApp contacts.
There are many reasons why we can be forced to hide our conversations and WhatsApp contacts and in which we are not going to enter since each person can have completely different reasons. The first thing you should know is that really contacts cannot be hidden, so we are forced to use a series of tricks that offer us, more or less, the same result.
Contacts cannot be hidden because the application needs a phone number to start a conversation. Telegram, to cite one of the fantastic alternatives available in the market, if it allows us to create and maintain conservation through a nickname, a function that will never reach WhatsApp after seeing it.
Archive conversations
One of the most used and recurring methods when it comes to hiding our conversations through WhatsApp is archiving conversations. When archiving the conservation, it is stored within this section and does not appear in the recent conversation history of the application, being an ideal method to hide our conversations quickly.
The archived conversations are at the top or bottom of the application (depending on the version we use since in iOS and Android the location of these varies). Every time we receive a message or write a new one, andThe chat file is shown again in the main history, so we must remember at all times to re-archive it once we have finished the conservation.
Change contact name
One of the methods that we can also use when hiding the contacts with which we maintain conservation in WhatsApp is change contact name. If the person who snoops in our conversation history, looks for something specific, he will look at the name of the person with whom we are having the conversation, he will never check the phone number.
As I mentioned above, WhatsApp works through phone numbers, so if we change the name of a contact in WhatsApp, the name of the conversation partner will update to show the new name. In this way, we can thus replace the name of the people with whom we have conversations through WhatsApp to hide them from the naked eye.
Hide contacts in the phonebook
If the option to rename the contacts that we have stored in the phonebook is not a solution, you should take a look at the HiCont application. Hide your contacts. This application hide the contacts that we previously selected from our agenda. In this way, anyone who has access to our smartphone will not have access to those numbers that we have hidden.
By hiding the contacts that we have in the agenda, WhatsApp will not associate the phone number with the name that is shown in the contact, so unless the curious on duty knows the phone number, it will be quite difficult to know who we are talking to through WhatsApp.
The application allows us to establish a pattern or unlock code so that no person who has access to our device can unblock all the contacts that we have stored in the application.
In this way, unless the curious on duty knows the application's unlock code, as long as they know of its existence, you will never be able to see who the phone numbers correspond to from our WhatsApp conversations.
Protect access to WhatsApp
Depending on the reason why we want to hide our WhatsApp contacts / conversations, if it is only that our friends do not have access to them, we do not have to go around hiding contacts, archiving conversations and others, since the fastest and easiest solution is to protect access to the application.
In this way, if someone wants to access our chats, you will need the app unlock code that we have previously established (if the terminal does not have unlocking by face or fingerprint), of our face or fingerprint if the smartphone has these functions.
To add a password to WhatsApp we must perform the steps that I detail below:
- With the application on the screen, click on the three vertical points located in the upper right part of the screen.
- In the menu that appears, click on Account and then on Privacy.
- Within Privacy, we look for the option Lock with fingerprint, with PIN code or by face (here it depends on the benefits of our smartphone).
- Within that menu, we select the option we want to use.
Every time we exit the application to open another or turn off the screen of our device, when we return to WhatsApp, this will require us to identify ourselves again in the application using the method that we have previously selected.
Use temporary conversations
This is probably the best option, if you are forced on many occasions to share your phone with other people (parents or guardians, partner, family ...), since it allows us to maintain conversations that are automatically deleted from our device after 7 days since they were sent, regardless of whether they have been read or not.
Both users need to enable this feature, otherwise it won't work. This option is found within the conversations options, through the Temporary messages option. The ideal of this function is that the messages they will be deleted as soon as they are read as if it happens with other platforms, but less gives a stone.
Protect conversations with a password
Another interesting option to take into account to keep our conversations protected through WhatsApp is using the Chat Locker for WhatsApp application, a free application that allows us add a password to our WhatsApp conversations, so that no one who does not have the password can access them.
If we do not want to use a numeric code, we can block access to conversations through fingerprint or face recognition if our terminal offers these functionalities. This application It works both with new conversations and with those that we have been using for a long time.
