Product Privacy & access
Not everyone should see every chat.
A shared inbox should not mean everyone reads everything. Decide per conversation and per label who sees what — and keep some of it off the shared floor entirely.
- 1One number, every kind of conversation in it
- 2Mark this one private — it leaves the shared floor
- 3Give Sales a label; the list narrows to theirs
- 4Numbers masked for everyone who does not need them
Why it exists
“Shared with the team” is not “shared with everyone”
The number a business runs is almost never a business-only number. Link it and the whole account arrives: the customers, and with them the family group, the doctor, the landlord and the bank. Most tools cannot tell those apart, so a team either gets access to all of it or to none of it — and neither answer is the right one.
The useful version of this is per conversation, not per workspace. One chat can be private to the person whose number it is while the other four hundred stay shared, and the rule that makes that true has to be one an administrator cannot quietly step around.
What you get
In the product today.
Private chats
Mark a conversation private and it stays with the person who linked the number — synced, searchable, theirs. Not the team’s, not an admin’s, not the workspace owner’s. It is the one rule an admin account cannot reach past.
Or never synced at all
A step further: a chat set never to sync is not stored here, and switching it on deletes what was kept before — messages and files together. A setting that leaves the data sitting there is not privacy.
Access by label
Give an agent a label and they see the chats that carry it. Finance sees finance, support sees support — plus whatever is shared with them, or with their team, by name.
Number masking
Switch it on for a conversation and everyone below admin sees +XXX XXX XX40 in place of the customer’s number. The chat works exactly as before; the contact detail does not leave with them.
History from a date you choose
Bring somebody onto a number without handing them years of back-history. Set the date the team’s history starts, and older messages stay with the owner and admins.
A new number holds its backlog
WhatsApp pushes the entire account history the moment a number links. That history is held rather than published while its owner marks what is personal, and only then does it reach the team.
When you would use it
Situations this is for
- A founder’s number the whole team works, where not every chat is theirs to read.
- Separating finance, HR and support on one number by label.
- Onboarding an agent who should answer the customer without collecting their phone number.
- Answering a client’s “who at your company can see our messages?” with something specific.
Questions
Privacy & access — questions
Can an admin read a private chat?
No. Private means the person who linked the number and nobody else. An admin bypass would defeat the point of the setting, so the rule sits above the admin bypass rather than beside it.
Does privacy carry through to notifications and exports?
Yes. A chat you cannot see never reaches your bell, your email digest or a push, and it is left out of exports and analytics too. Alerts are filtered by the same rule as the inbox, not by a second one that has to be kept in step with it.
Who decides that a chat is private?
The person who linked the number, and only them — not their manager, and not an admin.
What about a personal group we forget to mark?
Touchpoint reads the group name and how many of its members you have already saved as contacts, then asks the number’s owner whether it is personal. Until they answer, the group stays visible in the inbox but is kept out of tickets and analytics. It never changes a setting on its own.
Is this on every plan?
Private chats and access by label are built in on both plans. Number masking is a Pro feature.
Read next
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