How WhatsApp Usernames Make You Much Safer In Real Life

Stop giving out your number to strangers

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Many hands holding many smartphones with speech bubbles coming from the phones.

Fact checked by Jerri Ledford

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Many hands holding many smartphones with speech bubbles coming from the phones.

WhatsApp may finally let you stop giving your phone number to every stranger or business you want to chat with.

There are two huge privacy leaks in the WhatsApp messaging service. One is that you must upload your address book—aka other people’s private data—to (parent company) FaceBook’s servers. The other is that you must give people your phone number to connect with them. WhatsApp’s new usernames may fix the latter.

“WhatsApp is increasingly being used for sales, customer support, and other professional reasons, and users must be given the ability to engage with business channels without needing to provide their cell phone number,” Ray Walsh, a digital privacy expert at ProPrivacy, told Lifewire via email. “Constantly sharing phone numbers on WhatsApp is contributing to the proliferation of personal data that allows cybercriminals to engage in phishing and other scams, which is why it is essential for WhatsApp to give users the option to conceal this sensitive personal data.”

Why Do People Use WhatsApp?

According to reporting from WABetaInfo, a recent beta version of WhatsApp has a section where users can choose a unique username. This would let people connect with new users without giving out a phone number and could possibly remove the need for a phone number altogether, although WhatsApp would likely keep the phone number requirement for account signups to discourage spam accounts.

If you only use your messaging app to chat with friends and family, the phone number requirement is no big deal. In fact, it’s very convenient, as it lets you easily start new chats with people who are already in your address book. But in much of Europe, WhatsApp is the default communication method, which means giving out your phone number to lots and lots of strangers.

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Using a WhatsApp username allows us to keep our information confidential while still allowing us to make contact and connections.

Call the carpenter to come and fix that wooden thing you broke, and they’ll ask for your number to WhatsApp you. The same for replying to classified ads and so on. Where I live, people don’t even make regular phone calls. They prefer WhatsApp calls.

It’s true that we have been giving out our phone numbers for decades, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to continue, especially as our phone numbers are used for various security checks, like sending two-factor login codes via SMS.

“Nowadays, it is becoming more and more important to protect our privacy. We should not be sharing personal, identifiable information such as phone numbers, social security numbers, etc., with companies and services that we have no need to share them with. Using a WhatsApp username allows us to keep our information confidential while still allowing us to make contact and connections,” IT expert Zac Yap told Lifewire via email.

WhatsApp Usernames Make It Easier (Mostly)

Another common use case is for people that travel for work or move to a new country. These folks may swap SIM cards either permanently or while traveling to get a local number. The problem is, if you switch phone numbers in WhatsApp, then you do not take your contacts or conversations with you. It will be as if you disappeared and signed up with a new account, and you’ll have to start over.

And if your move is permanent, you’ll be stuck giving people your now-foreign number, which causes all kinds of hassle.

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Closeup on a smartphone screen showing message notifications from WhatsApp and Twitter.

“As someone who travels for work and maintains multiple local phone numbers, WhatsApp makes discoverability difficult and frustrating when someone doesn’t have my ‘WhatsApp Number,’ but rather a different one,” social media adviser and frequent traveler Will Stew told Lifewire via email. “I wish I could just use my Instagram or Facebook username, it’s still identifiable, but it keeps my personal phone number private. SIM scams are a real thing, and WhatsApp can easily do better in helping their users avoid this kind of exposure.”

But there is a possible downside.

“Concealing phone numbers from other users could create the opportunity for anonymous harassment or spamming, which is why WhatsApp must also implement a reliable username system that provides accountability and a robust complaints procedure that lets users report abuse,” says privacy expert Walsh.

Overall, though, privacy and ease of use will be greatly increased by adding WhatsApp usernames, and if WhatsApp chooses to keep using phone numbers behind the scenes, all the other conveniences are still there. Win-wins like this are so rare when it comes to big tech that we’re starting to wonder what the catch might be.