How to Use the Chat Lock Feature to Lock Your WhatsApp Chats

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WhatsApp offers several features to offer users a private and secure messaging experience. The ability to lock your WhatsApp is one of the features that limits who can open WhatsApp and access your conversations.

Now Meta is taking this one step further with a new feature called Chat Lock. This feature enables you to lock individual WhatsApp chats to add an extra layer of security to your private conversations.

Here’s how Chat Lock works and how to use it.

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Chat Lock is a feature that lets you lock individual chats in WhatsApp. You can use it to lock your more private conversations, which can include one-on-one chats as well as group conversations. This can come in handy when you’ve to hand your phone unlocked to someone and don’t want them to see your private WhatsApp conversations.

Currently, the Chat Lock feature requires you to use your phone’s password/PIN or biometric authentication to lock your chats. But Meta says the platform will eventually let you use a unique password—different from your device’s password—to lock your chats.

When you lock a chat in WhatsApp, a couple of things happen.

One, the chat no longer lives in your inbox (main chat window screen). It goes into a protected folder called Locked Chats at the top of your inbox. This folder contains all your locked chats, and you need your phone’s password/PIN or biometrics to unlock it and access all your locked WhatsApp chats.

Two, WhatsApp hides the contents of incoming messages for locked chats. So when the sender sends you a message, you only get an alert about a new message, and it’s only when you authenticate yourself that you get to see its content.

Once you’ve decided to lock a conversation in WhatsApp, you can do so as shown below. The steps to enable Chat Lock are the same on both Android and iOS. As of writing, the feature’s only available on iPhone, so we’ve included the screenshots for just the iPhone.

Unlocking the Locked Chats folder and accessing your chats in WhatsApp is as simple as unlocking your device. Here are the steps to do this:

If you want to remove the Chat Lock from a locked WhatsApp Chat, you can do this using these steps:

Upon doing this, the chat will be unlocked and back in your inbox. You can now access it like other chats and see its contents—if you haven’t disabled the preview option—like before.

WhatsApp’s new Chat Lock feature is a great way to keep your intimate conversations more private and prevent unauthorized access, as you’ve seen. That said, we wish the platform offered the option to use a custom password—different from your phone’s—as that would offer even better protection.

However, Meta says it plans on adding it along with more options, like locking chats on companion devices, in the coming months to make the Chat Lock feature even more effective at keeping your conversations private.

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