[imagesource: Reuters/Thomas White]

WhatsApp offers an easy way to stay in touch with family and friends around the world, and that’s proving particularly important during our national lockdown.

Sadly, it’s also proven to be a hotbed of misinformation, and now the messaging app has had to take extreme measures to curb this spread.

Without going into too great a detail on that front, WhatsApp has amended its message forwarding limits.

It’s also important to note that media law experts believe WhatsApp admins in South Africa may be held liable for false information shared on their groups – read more on that here.

Putting that aside, let’s focus on the new features available in the latest WhatsApp beta update for Android, as reported on by MyBroadband. These are not yet available to the general public, but can be expected in updates further down the line.

To start, the search function has been improved:

A new Advanced Search Mode is currently under development and should make it easier to locate data among all your chats with refined search capabilities.

It allows the user to search for particular types of data according to several filters. Users can filter data by photos, videos, audio, GIFs, documents, or links.

Now, when you want to shame your friend with a picture they sent you way back in the day, you’ll be able to do so quicker.

The second feature involves added protection for the Google Drive backups of your WhatsApp chat history:

In the latest update, WhatsApp added the field where users can type in their password.

It should be noted that this password is not saved in WhatsApp or Facebook’s servers and that there will be no way to recover this chat history if the password is lost…

Finally, if you’ve grown weary of your phone becoming clogged up with those terrible videos your mate on that one group chat keeps sending, you’ll like the new auto-download rules:

WhatsApp will now no longer automatically download frequently forwarded images, videos, documents, and voice messages by default.

WhatsApp users can configure their auto-download settings themselves under the data and storage usage section of the app’s settings menu.

This currently allows users to select which types of media are automatically downloaded while using mobile data, Wi-Fi, or roaming.

Good to know.

I’d like WhatsApp to add a fourth feature, whereby that mate who sends kak videos automatically gets a timeout as punishment, but I guess we live in hope.

Again, as a reminder, please be mindful of the information you share around during this pandemic.

[source:mybroadband]