WhatsApp Revamps Group Chats with New Communities Feature
Today WhatsApp is launching Communities (subgroups). It makes groups better by enabling sub-groups, multiple threads, announcement channels, and more. We’re also rolling out polls and 32-person video calling too • Full Story
The Communities rollout coincides with several other upgrades that apply to any group chat in the app. Groups chats can now include polls and host video calls with up to 32 people. WhatsApp also increased the limit on group members to 1024 people. These features add to several other upgrades to WhatsApp which rolled out a few months ago, including emoji reactions and larger file sharing.
Like regular conversations and group chats, messages in Communities are end-to-end encrypted, according to WhatsApp. That adds a level of of security that’s unavailable on most other platforms that offer features similar to Communities. But if you’re really worried about privacy and security, you might want to try Signal instead.
Signals group chats aren’t as full-featured as WhatsApp’s Communities, but Signal groups are encrypted. WhatsApp can’t read your messages, but the company does harvest metadata (details like who you’re messaging and when) which it analyzes for a number of business purposes, and WhatsApp reserves the right to use that data for advertising purposes and share it with Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company and also the owner of Instagram and Facebook. Signal and the company has a far more stringent privacy policy and goes out of its way to avoid collecting metadata and other information.
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