Your status updates can only be seen by someone if you have their phone number in your phone’s address book and they have your phone number in their phone’s address book.
You can choose to share your status updates with all your contacts or select contacts only. By default, your status updates are shared with all your contacts.
To change your status privacy
- Tap Status.
- Android: Tap More options
- Status Privacy
- iPhone: Tap Privacy.
Select one of the following options:
- My contacts: All your contacts will see your status updates.
- My contacts except…: All your contacts except the people you select will see your status updates.
- Only share with…: Only the contacts you select will see your status updates.
How to Change Privacy Policy Settings
- Changes to your privacy settings won’t affect status updates you’ve sent already.
- If you’ve disabled read receipts, you won’t be able to see who’s viewed your status updates. If a contact has disabled read receipts, you won’t be able to see if they’ve viewed your status updates.
- Sharing status updates to Facebook Stories and other apps
If you share your status update, the content of your status update will be shared with other apps. When sharing your status update, WhatsApp won’t share your account information with Facebook or other apps.
How to use status on Android OS
Status allows you to share text, photo, video, and GIF updates that disappear after 24 hours, and that is also end-to-end encrypted. In order to send and receive status updates to and from your contacts, you and your contacts must have each other’s phone numbers saved in your phones’ address books.
Create and send a status update
Open WhatsApp > STATUS.
- Tap: Text to compose a written status update. You can tap Emoji to add emoji or GIFs, T to pick a font, or Color to pick a background color.
- Camera or My status to take a photo, record a video, or GIF or choose an existing photo, video, or GIF from the picker. You can also add a caption or make edits to the photo, video, or GIF, which you can learn how to do in this article.
- Tap Send
Alternatively, you can create and send a picture, video, or GIF status update by going to the CHATS tab, then tapping Camera
Note: WhatsApp supports 3GP and mpeg4 video formats. View or reply to a status update
- To view a contact’s status update, tap the STATUS tab. Then, tap the contact’s status update.
- To reply to a contact’s status update, tap REPLY while viewing.
