Whatsapp introduces Secret Code for Chat Lock

Earlier this year, Whatsapp had rolled out Chat Lock to help people protect their more sensitive conversations. Now, Whatsapp is launching ‘Secret Code’, an additional way to protect those chats and make them harder to find if someone has access to one’s phone or is the phone is shared with someone else. 

Once a code is created, it can be used to hide the locked chats so that they only appear when typed into the search bar. With a Secret Code users will now be able to set a unique password different from what they use to unlock their phone to give their locked chats an extra layer of privacy. Users will have the option to hide the Locked Chats folder from their chatlist so that they can only be discovered by typing the user’s secret code in the search bar. If that doesn’t suit the user’s needs, they can still choose to have them appear in their chatlist. Whenever there’s a new chat which the user wants to lock, they can now long press to lock it rather than visiting the chat’s settings. 

Commenting on the launch of the ‘Secret Code’ feature, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, Meta, said, “We are rolling out secret code to Chat Lock on WhatsApp so that you can protect your chats with a unique password. Now, you can set your locked chats to only appear when you type the secret code in the search bar, so no one can ‘unintentionally’ discover your most private conversations.”

Secret code starts rolling out in the US from today (December 1, 2023), and in the coming months will be available globally.