Hacker News Reader

Comment by grawprog | Hacker News Reader

I really hate the online notification in WhatsApp because it's not possible to disable it. Even Facebook lets you appear offline if you want to. It's been a standard feature of messaging apps since pretty much as long as they've existed. Why whatsapp chose to make this setting like this has always just made my brain hurt.

Does anyone actually like that every time you open WhatsApp any person who has WhatsApp installed and has your number in their contact list, they can see that you opened the app with zero way to disable it? That would be bad enough on a desktop app, on a mobile app it's completely and utterly fucked.

View on HN

I wonder what status your contacts see if you have WhatsApp Web open...

If someone really needs a workaround, a hack would be to have a browser instance somewhere connected to WA Web and if necessary some sort of virtual mouse randomly clicking contacts so WA thinks you're actually active. That way you'll always appear online to your contacts, and they won't know what your real status is.

Whatsapp web doesn't seem to update the presence status, as I've seen people ask why others are able to reply without their last-online time updating.

Testing it yesterday with 2 phones/accounts, I do see my account coming online when I switch the focus to the WA web tab. When I switch tabs, after a while it says "last seen...".

Yes, I hate it too. My boss doesn't need to know when I'm texting, and they can see this even if they don't use any cyberstalking software.

I turn off wifi and cell service if I want to open the app surreptitiously. I’m not sure if it reports “last seen” in that scenario but at least there is one way to check the app without reporting.

Yeah I do that too. It's a hacky work around though and I'm still not entirely sure it won't show you online briefly once you turn data on again. I know it shows you as online if you answer a message using the notification bar. I tested that one. It happens as soon as you click reply.

Having 2 phones and 2 accounts I just checked.

I opened Whatsapp at xx:00, other phone says "Last seen xx:00". Put phone to airplane mode, and at xx:03 I opened WhatsApp in that mode, then put WA on background (without "killing" it from the task switcher) and I immediately turned off airplane mode.

I checked on the other phone, and it still said "Last seen at xx:00". So, it seems that line is honest, since I was on airplane mode, the network didn't "see" me.

That's good to know at least. Honestly, I get overly paranoid sometimes about such things. It's hard to know what apps do in the background these days.

Wait, WhatsApp has status notifications??

You can disable it so other's don't know if you're online, you also won't be able to see if other's are online.

Settings, Account, Privacy, Last seen - (options are everyone, my contacts, nobody). Set it to nobody

You can also turn off your read receipts.

Unfortunately, this doesn't work. That setting change prevents people from seeing "last seen", which is different than "online". The article talks about this as well.

> You can disable it so other's don't know if you're online

You cannot do this. Hiding "last seen" does not stop whatsapp from showing you online. It will always show you as online (even to people not in your contacts) if you open the app while being connected to the internet.

This still exposes whether you are online, just not the last seen time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com