WhatsApp users are being urged to change their settings today, after a new upgrade is rolled out preventing people becoming victims of cyber crime.
The new Silence Unknown Callers feature does exactly what it says on the tin - and will prevent calls coming through if the caller isn't a contact in your phonebook.
The change will hopefully mean that cold callers and scammers who may have found your number through a data breach will have less chance of actually getting in contact with you. It's a vital upgrade, especially considering cyber crooks often use this method to try and trick unsuspecting victims into handing over personal data.
The Mirror reports that WhatsApp explains in a post on its blog: "Silence Unknown Callers is designed to give you more privacy and control of your incoming calls. It helps to automatically screen out spam, scams, and calls from unknown people for increased protection."
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It's worth a mention that you'll still be able to see everyone who has attempted to make contact with you, but numbers not recognised will be added to the phone's call log rather than appearing on-screen. Mark Zuckerberg, who is the founder and CEO of Meta, said: "You can now automatically silence incoming calls from unknown contacts on WhatsApp for even more privacy and control."
If you want to set it up, all you have to do is head to the app's settings menu and tap Privacy. From there, you'll see an option to toggle on and off 'Silence Unknown Callers'.
Alongside the new feature, WhatsApp says that it is also bringing in something called Privacy Checkup. The IM service hopes that this will ensure all users to understand the options of protection through WhatsApp.
Featuring step-by-step guides for important privacy settings, it will allow users to choose the correct level of protection. To try it out, you can simply select 'Start checkup' in your Privacy settings menu.
This will then help you navigate multiple privacy layers to strengthen the security of your messages, calls and personal info.
