For a long time, Meta-owned WhatsApp was working on a feature that would allow you to hide your "last seen" status from specific people in order to empower its users with new functionalities and to support their privacy concerns.
Finally, during mid-November, the beta version for Android was launched with an option to hide your "last seen" status from specific people. With these significant changes to its privacy settings, WhatsApp is enabling a feature that will make disabling privacy settings for particular contacts a lot easier.
While this feature was expected to be released in the current application, this is taking time and still not released for the regular application. However, the beta version for iOS and Android phones contains this feature.
Presently, the regular version of Facebook-owned messaging app has three privacy settings (last seen, profile picture, about) with three selections (everyone, my contacts, nobody) to manage these settings and this new update would add one more option to these settings.
This meant that, if you didn’t want a specific contact to see your last seen, you had to set the privacy setting of your last seen to “nobody”. The new update ensures that users can now finally enable their last seen back, and they can restrict it to specific contacts.
This additional privacy update for 'Last Seen', ‘Profile Picture’ and 'About Me' is presently being tested for regular WhatsApp applications but since WhatsApp has been known as a cautious company, the update might take some time to surface in the original version.
Hence, at some point in time, the user can select their ‘last seen’ option to be available for everyone, their contacts, nobody, and the all-new “by a specific few”.