All WhatsApp users are urged to change the setting TODAY to lock your texts – don’t leave them unprotected

IF YOU’RE worried about people snooping on your WhatsApp chats, there’s an easy way to protect them from prying eyes.

By diving into the app’s settings, you can lock your messages behind a face recognition or fingerprint scan on iPhone.

This means your chats are protected from prying eyes even when your iPhone is unlocked.

To set this up you need to go to your WhatsApp settings by clicking on the gear icon at the bottom of your display.

Beat Account > privacy > screen lock. From here you can turn on either Touch ID or Face ID.

You can also select the minimum amount of time you want to elapse before your biometric ID is required again.

Now when you open WhatsApp, you will be asked for your fingerprints or a scan of your face to access your chats.

This means if you hand someone your phone, you can be sure that they are not secretly spying on your chats.

However, it’s still possible to read and quickly reply to messages in your device’s notification window, so the tool isn’t foolproof.

To really lock your iPhone, you can turn off all message previews in your device settings at any time.

Whether you have the option to lock your chats behind Face ID or Touch ID depends on the iPhone model you are using.

Face ID is available on every model after the 2017 iPhone X, while the models before it use Touch ID.

WhatsApp has made a number of changes over the past few months to protect user privacy.

The US chat app recently rolled out an update that prevents people who aren’t in your contacts from seeing your “last seen” status.

“Last Seen” is the timestamp displayed on your WhatsApp profile and chats to show when you last opened the app.

It’s possible to hide it in your WhatsApp settings, but until now it was visible to everyone by default.

After the update, only contacts and those you’ve chatted with will see your status, keeping the last time you used the app private from everyone but your contacts.

And last year, WhatsApp announced that it was expanding its disappearing messages feature, which ensures they disappear after a set period of time.

Users can now set texts to self-destruct after 24 hours, seven days, or 90 days. You can also now choose to have all your messages disappear by default.

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