Back in the golden days of Facebook, birthdays were a big thing. You couldn’t wait for your birthday to come, not because you’d see people who are close to you in person and receive gifts, but because your wall would get populated with best wishes by a good chunk of your friends list.
However, as the platform changed and generations moved away from the platform, the tradition of writing on someone’s wall for their birthday has died down. But it looks like Meta is looking to bring that tradition back, only not on Facebook, but this time on WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is developing a feature that will notify users when it's a contact's birthday. The addition was spotted in the WhatsApp beta for Android 2.26.27.3, available now on the Google Play Store. The feature is still in early development, so we don’t know the official release timeline yet.
The feature works through a dedicated section where users can see a list of upcoming birthdays from their contacts. When one of those dates arrives, WhatsApp sends an in-app notification as a reminder. And given how many people already use WhatsApp to send birthday messages in the first place, a built-in reminder makes sense.
The birthday reminders are tied to a separate feature that WhatsApp is also testing. That feature is age verification, which is supposed to confirm a user meets the minimum age required by law, but also collect their birthday info in the process. So, if a contact never entered their birth year, there's simply no data for WhatsApp to work with, so the reminder feature depends heavily on adoption of that earlier system.
Meta has been going aggressive when it comes to WhatsApp data collection, with the introduction of usernames being far the biggest change. So, it’s normal that people are now concerned about privacy. While WhatsApp implemented security measures for usernames, there are no such controls for birth year visibility yet. To be fair, it's possible WhatsApp adds that option before launch, since the feature is still early, but nothing as it exists in the current beta.
For now, this remains an Android-only feature in testing, with WhatsApp saying it'll share more once the birthday section gets closer to a wider release.
Via: WABetaInfo
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