WhatsApp Says It Banned Over 2 Million s in in One Month to Prevent Harmful Behaviour 2u2p3w Technology News

WhatsApp said that of the 2 million banned s, most (95 percent) were banned for automated bulk messaging 6i4mv

By Gopal Sathe | Updated: 15 July 2021 21:10 IST

WhatsApp Says It Banned Over 2 Million s in in One Month to Prevent Harmful Behaviour

Photo Credit: Pixabay 3u334z

WhatsApp said that globally it banned an average of 8 million s in this time

Highlights

WhatsApp published its first transparency report under the new IT rules
It says it banned 20 lakh s in India between May 15 and June 15
Globally it banned 80 lakh s in the same period, it reported

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WhatsApp says that it banned 20 lakh s between May 15 and June 15, 2021, to try and prevent harmful behaviour. In its first transparency report, published under the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the company revealed that it had banned 20,11,000 s in this one-month period. The Facebook-owned messaging platform identifies Indian s through the +91 country code of the mobile number used to . It also added that India alone s for 25 percent of all the s banned in the world.

WhatsApp published the first edition of its intermediary guidelines report on Thursday, and in this, the company highlighted its own actions to prevent harmful behaviour. "Our top focus is preventing s from sending harmful or unwanted messages at scale," WhatsApp said in its report that it also shared on email to Gadgets 360. "We maintain advanced capabilities to identify these s sending a high or abnormal rate of messages and banned 2 millions s in India alone from May 15 - June 15 attempting this kind of abuse."

"In addition to the behavioural signals from s, we rely on available unencrypted information including reports, profile photos, and group photos and descriptions, besides deploying advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on our platform," WhatsApp added.

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According to WhatsApp, it received a total of 70 reports for , 204 for ban appeals (of which it took action on 63), 20 for other , 43 for product , and 8 for "safety issues". It added that almost 95 percent (or 19 lakh) of the bans were carried out automatically, after the service detected "automated bulk messaging", or spam.

It added that the number of s that were banned has gone up significantly since 2019, because "our systems have increased in sophistication, so we are catching more s even as we believe there are more attempts to send bulk or automated messages."

In its report, WhatsApp shared that the global average is about 8 million s banned per month, which is to say that bans in India (most of which were for bulk messaging or spam) ed for a fourth of all the bans in the world.

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This is not surprising given that India is the largest market for WhatsApp — some industry estimates suggest that India s for almost 400 million s, of the 2 billion active s worldwide, or approximately one from India out of every five that WhatsApp has.

WhatsApp added that subsequent editions of the data transparency report will be published 30-45 days after the reporting period, to allow sufficient time for data collection and validation.

Does WhatsApp's new spell the end for your privacy? We discussed this on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts.

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