Summary
- WhatsApp is a major form of communication for many globally, with billions of users sending messages daily.
- Link previews provide quick insights on shared webpages, but can clutter conversations and pose security risks.
- An upcoming toggle in WhatsApp beta may allow users to disable link previews for added privacy.
As one of the best encrypted instant messaging apps on the Play Store, WhatsApp has amassed billions of users who send millions of messages on the app every day. Like most of its rivals, WhatsApp allows sending texts, images, links, videos, and even polls or broadcast messages. However, it isn’t as advanced as some other platforms like Discord and Slack in one aspect — link previews. Thankfully, change looms on the horizon.
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WhatsApp is a primary form of communication for a third of the people around the world
Link previews are a great way to ascertain the contents of a webpage without actually tapping the link. For instance, a link preview for a Reddit post shows an image/video thumbnail from the post, the subreddit name, and a customizable one-line preview of text from the webpage encouraging you to visit the link. This segment can include the upvote count, comment count, name of the uploader, etc.
While link previews are helpful at first glance, they may not always be desirable. Previews could clutter up a conversation quickly if you share links as individual messages, and may also defeat the purpose if you’re trying to Rickroll the recipient or send a private link to just a few members of a group chat. I’ve noticed that sending messages quickly after pasting the link prevents preview generation, but you can also dismiss a preview before hitting Send if WhatsApp pulls one from the website’s HTML tags or meta tags.
One toggle to banish previews forever
If you deal with a lot of links every day, it’s easy to see how manually dismissing these link previews can rapidly become a menace. Link previews and the partial data they have about the webpage can threaten user security if intermediary services generate the preview. Security researchers have found other Meta apps like Instagram and Facebook download complete copies of linked pictures and video, although we would like to think WhatsApp doesn’t do this to preserve end-to-end encryption. Other approaches to generate previews could also expose the requester’s IP address, and hence location.
While Discord and Slack have toggle switches to disable link previews by default, WhatsApp lacks such controls. However, the sleuths at WABetaInfo dug through beta version 2.23.21.12 of the app to discover Meta is working on a setting to change the default behavior.
Although the toggle isn’t even visible to beta testers yet, it should show up under Settings → Privacy → Advanced → Disable link previews. Interestingly, the toggle shows up underneath the setting to mask your IP address during calls, which could tie into the IP-related security concerns with link previews we mentioned earlier. That said, WABetaInfo notes that turning off this toggle will only prevent preview generation for messages you send — the preview content would remain appended to links you receive from others until they turn off the setting as well, or manually disable previews.
This is a convenient privacy feature to have and anyone sharing or receiving links on the regular would likely appreciate it. As with most in-development features, it’s hard to say when we may see this in a stable version of the app, though.
