Taxing gatekeepers~I
By 2016-17, Facebook had designed a business model that aimed at maximising the ‘user engagement’, that is how much time users spent on their platform, and started collecting data on what they liked and shared.
Meta-owned WhatsApp is reportedly rolling out a new feature designed to keep channel creators informed about the status of their channels on Android, especially when they are closed in specific countries.
This move comes in response to local laws requiring the platform to restrict access to specific content within certain regions, reports
WABetaInfo.
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This feature will allow WhatsApp to notify the channel creator if their channel’s visibility is restricted in certain countries due to legal
requirements.
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According to the report, channel alerts work by notifying the channel creator when their channel is closed in a specific country, meaning users with phone numbers associated with that country will no longer be able to access or follow the channel.
The channel alerts feature to notify creators about the status of their channels is available to some beta testers, the report said.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp is reportedly rolling out an ‘automatic security code verification’ feature for end-to-end encryption to a limited number of beta testers on Android.
With this feature, the app will try to automatically verify if messages are end-to-end encryption without requiring any user intervention.
This process will be called “Key Transparency”, enhancing the overall security and privacy of users’ conversations by checking if they are using a secure connection. However, WhatsApp still provides users with the manual verification feature in case the automatic verification fails or it is not available.
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