You can now stop people from adding you to WhatsApp groups without your consent

Anyone who's anyone now uses WhatsApp to message their buddies or keep in touch with their folks.

However, we all know the dreaded feeling of getting added to group chat with about 30 other people, that will ruin your notifications until kingdom come.

They are usually called something like 'Dan's Stag-Do' or 'Jon's mad 30th birthday' or even a completely inane group where people just share Rick and Morty memes.

On the surface, they seem like a fun and easy way to keep up with what's going on in a certain circle of friends but after the hundredth gif appears in the conversation, your more or less ready to give up.

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There are two things you could do here. Either mute the group, thus not receiving any notifications and only contributing when you want or leave the group altogether which comes with it's own problems i.e. the passive aggressive subtext that you have left the group because you find your friends boring and annoying.

Thankfully the big wigs at WhatsApp have found a way to render this problem obsolete and have save your phone from being swamped from pointless updates all day.

A new feature has been introduced that allows you to first consent as to whether you wish to join the group in the first place. Which admittedly has it's own social problems ("OMG why didn't they joing my group chat!) but is a welcome addition nonetheless.

How to stop people adding you into 'Group Chats' that you don't want to join

It's not something that automatically happens and you need to enable the feature first. Here's how you do it:

• Open WhatsApp on your phone, and go to Settings > Accounts > Privacy.
• Go to groups and select whichever options suits you best.
• The first option will prompt the person adding you to first send an invitation that will be sent to you so that you can approve of whether you want to join the group or not.
• Beyond that there are more specific options available. These include nobody being able to add you, only people from your contacts adding you or if you want to go completely rogue you can allow anyone to add you to any old group.

TNW reports that the changes have started to be rolled out as of Wednesday but will be available to everyone on the network in the next few weeks.

HT The Next Web

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