WhatsApp on iOS

wendy knox everette

Published in

Be Secure

3 min readFeb 10, 2017

To start with, find WhatsApp in the AppStore, and install.

Settings

Once it’s installed, you can update a few settings to be more secure. Start by going to the Settings page:

From the settings page, you’ll want to tap on “Account” where you can edit several different settings.

Account Settings

You can choose to disable sharing your account info with Facebook. Below, the setting is “on” — you just slide the option to off to turn off sharing.

From here, tap on Privacy, and set your visibility; you can choose to share your Last Seen, Profile Photo and Status with just your contacts or Nobody.

Next, go back to the Account Settings page and tap on Security. Here, you will want to enable “Show Security Notifications” — you can read about that setting at WhatsApp or in this article.

After Security settings, go to Two-Step Verification from Account Settings. This is an option you can turn on which will prompt you for a passcode if you use your phone number with WhatsApp from another phone.

Chat Settings

Back on the main Settings page, you will see “Chats” under “Account.” Tap on Chats, and then turn off “Save Incoming Media.” You will probably not want to enable Chat Backup if you are using WhatsApp because of the small amount of information retained on the WhatsApp servers. If you enable this option, your chat information will be archived on iCloud, so if data minimization is a goal, you should leave this off. However, by turning this off, you will not be archiving all your chat history to restore from if you install WhatsApp on a new phone.

Notifications

From Settings, choose “Notifications” -here you can control the notifications from WhatsApp and disable previews. This can help make your use of WhatsApp a little more private. You can read more about the advantages of disabling previews in this article.

Sending & Receiving messages

Now, we are ready to chat! Tap on Chats at the bottom of the screen, and then tap on the Pencil & Paper icon in the top right.

You will then be able to send a message to your contacts. You can read about adding your iPhone contacts to WhatsApp if you don’t see your friends listed.