WhatsApp finally added usernames, so you can chat without sharing your phone number. It copies Signal’s privacy-first design, adding an optional four-digit key you can rotate to block leaks. Claim a username; enable the key unless you’re a business syncing your Instagram handle across Meta.
Better late than never: WhatsApp has finally opened up usernames.
Setting one up is child’s play, so instead of a tap-here-tap-there tutorial, I’d rather talk about whether you should claim a username at all, and if so, how to choose one. And no, I’m not talking fortune-telling — I mean the privacy and information-security considerations.
For readers outside Hong Kong, let me explain just how big WhatsApp is here: it’s what WeChat is to China, or LINE to Taiwan. That said, if you really want to split hairs, the three differ in how inescapable they are. In Taiwan, life without LINE just means a thinner social life; in Hong Kong, life without WhatsApp is genuinely hard; in China, life without WeChat is a matter of survival.
Phone Numbers: A Privacy Nightmare
Even so, I deleted my WhatsApp account over eight years ago — which tells you what a hermit I am. My main reason was precisely that WhatsApp uses your phone number as your account, and I simply didn’t want to keep using a mobile number. Which, naturally, calls for yet another digression.
Over the years, whenever people ask for my mobile number, I tell them I don’t have one — and more times than I can count, they’ve taken it as me putting on airs. They figure: what Hong Konger doesn’t have a mobile number? Clearly I just don’t want to hand it over and I’m lying to them. But in fact, I’m being perfectly sincere. When someone says they “have no time tomorrow,” do they mean their tomorrow doesn’t contain 24 hours? Of course not — they mean their time isn’t available to you. Same with me: I do have a pile of mobile numbers, more than I can even remember, but I don’t answer calls as a rule. “I have no number” runs on exactly the same logic as “I have no time.” It would be easy enough to fob people off with a number that would never reach me, but I choose to tell the truth — and unfortunately that often gets me branded as rude. Anyway: because I didn’t want to keep a fixed mobile number, in March 2018 I deleted my WhatsApp account.
Why am I so averse to phone numbers? First, reducing a living, breathing person to a string of digits is dehumanising — like calling a prisoner “24601” — and I find it deeply off-putting. You might think I’m being an overly highly sensitive type, but the habit of using one fixed phone number and answering calls by default is a privacy nightmare — and the fact that phone, SMS and WhatsApp scams happen literally every single day is just objective reality. For the past ten years I’ve had no fixed mobile number and I answer no calls except from my mum. I’ve sacrificed a fair amount of social life, convenience, even business opportunities — but I’ve also dodged every single phone scam, and spared myself a lot of distracting calls and junk messages.
You might think that a username, beyond being more human than a string of digits, ends up no different: once it leaks, every rando and scammer can find you, you lose your privacy just the same, and you’re pestered for good. And that’s exactly what we are going to discuss.
Username + Key: Where the Cleverness Lies
For this rollout, WhatsApp closely mimics the privacy-first Signal: on top of the username, it adds a four-digit key that you can change at any time.
Say Alice’s phone number is 98765432. She sets her WhatsApp username to aliceau, then goes to Settings > Account > Username > Contact me by username, chooses “People who know my key,” and lets the system generate a key — say, 2026. Once that’s done, and once WhatsApp fully rolls out usernames, Alice won’t need to reveal her phone number: she just tells Bob and Carol her username aliceau and key 2026, and the three of them can start chatting.
Later, Alice goes back into settings and generates a new key — say, 2027. Bob and Carol’s existing conversations are unaffected, but at the same time, even if aliceau and the key 2026 leak, without the new key 2027 Dave still can’t start a conversation with Alice.
Everyone knows that changing a traditional phone number comes at enormous cost — notifying friends, family, banks and every other institution is a disaster — so unless they’re determined to “turn over a new leaf,” your average city-dweller won’t change their number on a whim (oddballs like me excepted). But the beauty of this WhatsApp — really, Signal — design is that you don’t need to notify the friends you’ve already talked to; you just change the key from time to time, and you can effectively stop others from barging in because your username leaked, or from plain random phishing.
A lot of people want their WhatsApp username to sync with Instagram and Threads, and WhatsApp has taken this into account: to claim a given Instagram/Threads username as your WhatsApp username, you first have to link WhatsApp with Instagram/Threads into a unified Meta account. And that also means anyone who knows someone’s Instagram username can reach them on WhatsApp — “reading your plates,” so to speak, at zero cost. Which is exactly why the key matters especially for WhatsApp, cut from the same cloth as Instagram/Threads. I loathe Meta, but in fairness, adding a four-digit key for privacy-conscious users to switch on — leaving the choice in the user’s hands — is a rather sensible arrangement.
Advice for Three Types of Users
Back to the question I opened with — whether to claim a username, and if so how to choose one. A few concrete recommendations:
- Every WhatsApp user should give themselves a username. Even if you don’t care about privacy, it’s at least far more human than a string of digits.
- If you’re a business, or your work means you want people to reach you easily, then take on the risk of Meta one day raiding your account: link Instagram/Threads with WhatsApp, use your existing Instagram username for WhatsApp too, and leave the key mechanism off.
- If you don’t really run an Instagram/Threads account, or don’t have one at all, there’s no need to link anything: pick a WhatsApp username that doesn’t clash with an existing Instagram handle, and switch the key option on.
As for me — the guy who eight years ago, having sworn off phone numbers, steeled himself and deleted his WhatsApp account — will the arrival of usernames tempt me back onto WhatsApp, back to being a “normal person”? That one’s more complicated, and a little personal. If there’s interest, I’ll write about it another time.
POLL: WhatsApp has opened up usernames — now what?
- Sprint in and grab one right away — 53%
- Stay chill, no sense tailgating the hype, I’ll sort it out later — 28%
- Not setting one; my decade-unchanged phone number suits me just fine — 6%
- I don’t have a WhatsApp account — none of my business — 11%
- None of the above — I’ll tell you in the comments — 2%
p.s. Something I’d originally written into the piece but cut on second thought: in Hong Kong, without WhatsApp, even arranging a funeral is hard.
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