WhatsApp now lets you block people from exporting your entire chat history

WhatsApp is launching a new “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature that aims to prevent people from taking conversations outside the app. When the setting is turned on, you can block others from exporting your chat history and automatically downloading photos and videos sent in the app. The feature will prevent people from using messages for Meta […]

Apr 23, 2025 - 18:47

WhatsApp now lets you block people from exporting your entire chat history

WhatsApp is launching a new “Advanced Chat Privacy” feature that aims to prevent people from taking conversations outside the app. When the setting is turned on, you can block others from exporting your chat history and automatically downloading photos and videos sent in the app.

The feature will prevent people from using messages for Meta AI as well, which you can currently use to ask questions within a chat and generate images.

By default, WhatsApp saves photos and videos in a chat to your phone’s local storage. It also lets you and your recipients export chats (with or without media) to your messages, email, or notes app. The Advanced Chat Privacy setting will prevent this in group and individual chats.

WhatsApp doesn’t say whether Advanced Chat Privacy will prevent people from taking screenshots of your messages, or if users can still manually download media from chats. The Verge reached out to WhatsApp for more information but didn’t immediately hear back.

“We think this feature is best used when talking with groups where you may not know everyone closely but are nevertheless sensitive in nature,” WhatsApp says in its announcement. WABetaInfo first spotted this feature earlier this month, and now it’s rolling out to the latest version of the app.

You can turn on the setting by tapping the name of your chat and selecting Advanced Chat Privacy. WhatsApp says this is only the “first version” of this feature, as the company plans to add more protections in the future.