Do you want to chat on WhatsApp in ninja mode? By changing WhatsApp’s privacy options, you can hide your photo, when you last contacted and, relatively recently, if you are online on whatsapp.
Here we will tell you how exactly the “online” indicator of WhatsApp works and what you can do to hide it from some or all of your contacts with the options that WhatsApp offers you in its settings.
Operation of the “in line” indicator
To know how to hide WhatsApp “online” status, you first need to know exactly how it works. WhatsApp consider someone online while the app is in use. At this point, your account shows the status “online” for everyone. Until recently, it was public, so anyone could see it, whether you have it in your contacts or not.
WhatsApp consider someone to be offline when the application closes by itself, either naturally by the mobile’s battery saving system or because you have forced it to close from the recent view. If you close WhatsApp manually, the online status disappears automatically. If you don’t, it can take about ten minutes from when you stop using WhatsApp to when you appear offline to other people.
Message when the other person is online (left) and when not with last online time active (center) and off (right)
Now what other people see when you’re offline depends on other privacy settings, last login time. The default last login time is only visible to our contacts (although it is also possible to configure it to be seen by “Everyone”).
If last login time is disabled, as soon as your WhatsApp goes offline, nothing is displayed under your name. If you’ve enabled it and that person is allowed to see it, they’ll see what time you were last online.
How to hide that you are online on WhatsApp
whatsapp is allows us to hide that we are online in your privacy settings, but unfortunately the setting is closely tied to last online time, so we can’t choose a more restrictive setting when you’re online: it will be who sees your last online time or everyone.
This all sounds confusing, but it really isn’t. WhatsApp now allows us to match the setting of who sees when you’re online to who sees your last login, so you can technically hide both data from certain contacts, strangers or everyone.
To limit who can see when you’re online on WhatsApp,** you’ll need to follow two steps**: first, set it to who can see my last time
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Open WhatsApp and enter settings
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Press the heading account
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Come into privacy
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Come into last time
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Limit who can see your last login time (for example, only your contacts, no one, or your contacts with a few exceptions).
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At the bottom choose The same as last time.
In case you have any questions about how the current setup works, here’s a summary of the different setups you should do for typical use cases you might be interested in:
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To hide that you are online from everyone: Choose “Person” in Who can see the last time e Same as last time In Who can see when I’m online.
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To hide that you are online from strangers: Choose “My contacts” in Who can see the last time e Same as last time In Who can see when I’m online.
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To hide that you are online from certain contacts: Choose “My contacts, except” and tick in which you do not want to see it Who can see the last time
e Same as last time In Who can see when I’m online. -
To hide that you are online from everyone: Choose “Person” in Who can see the last time e Same as last time In Who can see when I’m online.
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To show you’re online to everyone: Choose “Everyone” in Who can see when I’m online.
Extra ball: airplane mode
An old trick that can be useful on occasions when you don’t even want to enter WhatsApp directly to change its settings (because you’ll show yourself logged in), is use mobile airplane mode when you go to open the app to reply to a message. That is, let all the messages enter you into WhatsApp and when you want to reply to them, close WhatsApp, turn on airplane mode, open WhatsApp again and write the reply.
Afterwards, Close WhatsApp by removing it from recent view and turn off airplane mode. The message you wrote will be sent as soon as WhatsApp recovers the connection, without ever showing the other person as being connected. Obviously, if someone receives a message, they will know you were online, but they won’t see your status and may think the message was sent earlier.
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