When it came to WhatsApp’s notice that organisations, marketers, and/or businesses are using tools to send bulk messages to advertise their products and services or propagate their own agenda via the regular platform, it decided to create a policy around this violation of their original policy.
Especially since the company has a separate platform – WhatsApp Business – for people who are willing to communicate to business or organisations.
Since the activities in question are in direct violation of WhatsApp’s Terms of Use, the company has announced that any entity, individual or a company, “engaging or assisting” in the sending of automated bulk messages will receive a legal action from WhatsApp in return. This policy is to come into effect from December 7 this year.
Now, when a company boasts of end-to-end encryption in messages, the task of identifying who-is-sending-what becomes a tricky contradiction that it has to work around. However, the company does claim to have a plan whereby it can identify the act of sending bulk messages, or non-personal usage, from outside of the platform.
These methods include identifying any claim made by a company around using WhatsApp as a means for spreading their reach or marketing, or you when users file complaints of spam and blocks, reports Business Standard via PTI.
This means that the companies against which WhatsApp has off-platform evidence of policy abuse beyond December 7, or on-platform evidence of policy abuse before the date are the ones getting in legal trouble.
WhatsApp claims that identification of policy violations happen at the time of registration, during messaging, or when complaints come from the users. While the first two are understandable, it is still uncertain how encrypted messages can be used for detection of this abuse without WhatsApp having to violate their own obligation to keep the messages beyond the scope of their surveillance.
Meanwhile, this seems to be the next step in WhatsApp’s recent initiatives towards reducing the avenues of fake news circulation and spamming that goes on on their platform. Earlier, WhatsApp had reduced the number of messages a person can send at a time to a minimum of 5 people. Also these messages got the branding of being “forwarded” messages.
