You’re likely chatting about different things with different people. Instant messaging allows us to keep multiple conversational contexts open at the same time. They don’t need to overlap what we share and who we are in each context. One chat partner doesn’t necessarily know what you’re talking about with the others. This is in the best interest of personal privacy. This changes though when someone has physical access to your chat device (such as your mobile phone). In these cases, you want your most sensitive conversations to be stowed away safely, only visible to you. In this article I will show you how to hide your private WhatsApp chats with Chat Lock. For this purpose I will be using the iOS app, but the same principles apply to Android as well.
Chances are high that you’re using WhatsApp to keep in touch with your family, friends, and acquaintances. There are other more privacy focused messengers out there, like for example TeleGuard, Telegram, or Signal. You still want to keep your WhatsApp chats to yourself. Since recently, they added a feature called Chat Lock. It allows to hide your chats from anyone not knowing where to look (and even password protect them). Read on and learn how to use this nifty feature.
Hiding a Contact with Chat Lock
In order to lock all conversations with a given contact in WhatsApp, go to that contact’s profile page. Scroll down until you see the option item “Lock chat“. Once tapped, an informational message will appear that confirms that this chat is now locked. The default media storing settings (e.g. shared photos go to your camera roll automatically) is overridden for locked chats automatically. You can still change that. By default though shared photos from hidden conversations will not go to your phone’s photo gallery automatically.
You can unlock individual contacts again the same way. Just toggle the “Lock chat” item again, and their conversations will be visible on the main chat list again.
Any chats with this particular contact will not appear in the normal Chats list anymore. To find the chats with the locked contact, go to your Chats list. Pull it down until at the very top the “Locked chats” item appears. When you tap on that, you will see the list of locked chats. It is accessible after you authenticated via Face ID (or similar).
Great, now your locked chats are safely stowed away in this new “Locked chats” list. It’s important to remember that this only applies to your mobile device that has Locked chats set up. The chats themselves are not hidden on the server side. If you linked other devices to your WhatsApp account (e.g., WhatsApp Web, or WhatsApp Desktop app), they are still visible. Make sure no-one has access to your linked devices. They can follow your conversations in your chat history just as if they weren’t locked away. The lock only applies to your one device you set them up on.
Hiding your Locked Chats
The above hides your sensitive communication from plain sight. It is easy for a knowledgable person to find out whether you have locked chats or not. In tense situations (maybe due to extortion) you may be forced to give away your locked chats list. Since it is visible when one knows where to look, this is a constant threat.
WhatsApp allows you to hide the presence of locked chats altogether, too. For that, go to the locked chats list and tap Settings on the top right. Toggle “Hide locked chats” on. An informational message will tell you that you need to set up a secret code now.
This secret code helps in hiding the locked chats list. The locked chats item won’t appear anymore when you pull down the chats list. It only becomes visible when you enter the secret code you chose into the search bar of your chats view. Once entered, the “Locked chats” item will appear again. Tapping it gets you to the same screen with the hidden conversations as before.
From now on, your locked chats list won’t appear when you drag down your chats list. You now reached a level of plausible deniability that removes any evidence your locked chats may be on your device. This is at least true for the prying eyes of your peers. Plausible deniability means that even if someone suspects that you do have chats hidden away, they can’t prove it. If someone asks, just play dumb – in many cases, this is the safest bet. This is how you hide your private WhatsApp chats with Chat Lock.
Removing Chat Lock Again
Locked chats are a great way to maintain secrecy and privacy in your WhatsApp communications. You may not always need or want it. You can easily disable the feature again. Just go to your WhatsApp Settings screen, tap “Privacy“, and open “Chat lock“. Here, tap “Unlock and clear locked chats“.
This option is here regardless of whether you actually have locked chats or not. It behaves the exact same way in both cases. This fact adds to the plausible deniability in this feature. It doesn’t give away the mere presence of hidden chats.
You will be asked for one more confirmation on whether you want to unlock all your hidden chats. If you tap “Unlock and clear“, all conversations will be unlocked. All chats will go back to your main chat list. The secret code you set above will be cleared.
From here on, you can just set up a new hidden chat list if you prefer. Even if you hide the chats with a contact, the contact itself will still be visible in your contact list.
Some words of warning. When the chats with a contact are hidden, you can still start a new conversation with that contact. This will directly lead you to that conversation in the locked chats list. Someone may suspect that you have hidden chats with a particular contact. All they have to do is start a regular conversation with them in the app containing the hidden chats. This will go directly to the Locked chats list (asking for authentication on the way). So try to be careful about what contacts you store on-device and how you handle them outside of hidden chats.
Conclusion
In this article, you learned how to hide your Private WhatsApp Chats with Chat Lock. You now know how to set it up, lock and unlock contacts, and even hide the locked chats list. I added side notes where I thought they are useful. This is a fun feature if you want to separate your regular “public” WhatsApp chats from more sensitive communications. There is always someone peeping over your shoulder in public places. There’s no need that they see what else is happening in your non-“public” communication stream. Be careful though, the chats aren’t “safe” ultimately, they are merely hidden from plain sight.
If you want real obfuscation features in your instant messenger, give Signal a go. They have a wide array of very nice privacy (on-device and off-device) features in place. If you want a more mainstream messenger, you may want to go for Telegram. If secrecy and anonymity is really a strong need for you, try TeleGuard. Centralized servers and messaging corporations might make you twitch though. A decentralized solution like Tox might just be the thing for you.
In any case, have fun messaging and stay safe online.
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