Recently, WhatsApp released an update that makes it impossible to take a screenshot of someone’s picture.
It looks like new updates to WhatsApp for Android have made it so that trying to take a screenshot of a contact profile picture gives you an error message. This was first seen by Android Police.
In our tests, there is no warning sign when we try to do this, but when we try to take a screenshot while looking at full-screen contact profile pictures, we now get a blank screen. Even though there is no way to stop this behavior, it was noticed in development a while ago.
When this does make it to the main version of the app, a warning message could be added.
Even though this change makes your privacy better, you can still take a picture of the mini-profile or profile preview that you can make bigger when you see all of your WhatsApp talks. This is an image that is not as high-resolution as your full-screen personal picture.
How to block screenshots of profile photos on WhatsApp
AP pointed out that this seems to be the normal way things work and isn’t just true for some app builds. People who have older builds of WhatsApp are seeing this behavior on builds that are newer than the one I have. In this case, it looks like the feature is being added through a server-side update and isn’t just on certain builds.
Meta probably wants to stop impersonation and other privacy issues by making it impossible to take screenshots of WhatsApp personal pictures. Other cross-platform chat apps, like Telegram and Signal, don’t have this feature yet.
To protect your privacy even more, go to Settings > Privacy > Personal Photo on WhatsApp and hide your picture. You can change who can see your page here.
