Whatsapp has over the years overtaken SMS and e-mails to become everyone’s favourite mode of messaging. The Facebook-owned messaging application has over 1.5 billion users worldwide, and in India alone it has over 400 million (40 crore) active users. And most Whatsapp users would agree that with huge user base comes a huge volume of messages — both wanted and unwanted. These days a majority of unwanted bulk messages are received by users from Whatsapp Groups where they may or may not have been added with their consent. The whole process of adding people on to one’s Whatsapp contacts is so simple that it is no wonder that users often wake up to find themselves added to a Whatsapp Group of their residential society or gym or family or in-laws or cousins or school friends or office colleagues or college mates or even local political parties’ election canvassing group. And what follows is a barrage of “Good morning!” and “Goodnight” messages with flower emojis, inspirational quotes, health hacks, announcements by UNESCO, and what not.
But there is a simple, but lesser-known, Whatsapp feature whereby one can save themselves from being added to random Whatsapp groups by known and unknown contacts and pesky acquaintances. You can opt out from being added to random Group chats via a simple fix.
Here’s how to select who can add you to Whatsapp Groups:
Open Whatsapp. On the top-right hand corner of your Whatsapp interface, tap the three vertical dots to open a pop-up menu.
Select “Settings”, which would be the last option on the pop-up menu.
Once inside Settings, select the “Account” tab and on the page that opens, choose the “Privacy” option.
On the Privacy page, scroll down to the “Groups” tab. It is set by default to “Everyone”, which means everyone can add you to Whatsapp Groups without your consent and bombard your Whatsapp inbox with meaningful or spam messages.
Clicking on the “Groups” button will take you to the page where the selector reads: “Who can add me to groups”. Under this there are three options — “Everyone”, “My Contacts”, and “My contacts except…”. Under the default settings, the “Everyone” tab is selected, which allows anyone and everyone to add you to Whatsapp chat groups.
By selecting the second option — “My Contacts” tab — you can choose to allow people you’re familiar with (i.e. – those on your Contacts list) to add you to Whatsapp groups. When you select the last option, “My contacts except…” it opens a list of your Contacts who are on Whatsapp, by clicking the button next to their name you can choose to “block” them from adding you to Whatsapp Groups. By not selecting a Contact, you’ll be giving them permission to add you to Whatsapp Groups in the future.
So go ahead, choose who can add you to groups and enjoy a more pleasurable Whatsapp experience.
