WhatsApp has announced a new security feature which enables protection of chats with passwords.

The new locked chats will live in a password- or biometrics-protected folder, and notifications from those conversations won’t display the sender or the actual message content.

Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder, announced this via his official Facebook handle on Monday, sharing pictures of what the upgrade on the social platform looks like was also shared.

“New locked chats in WhatsApp make your conversations more private. They’re re-hidden in a password-protected folder and notifications won’t show sender or message content”, Mr Zuckerberg disclosed.

“Today, we’re excited to bring to you a new feature we’re calling Chat Lock, which lets you protect your most intimate conversations behind one more layer of security.

“Locking a chat takes that thread out of the inbox and puts it behind its own folder that can only be accessed with your device password or biometric, like a fingerprint. It also automatically hides the contents of that chat in notifications, too,” WhatsApp said in a statement.