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 banned a record of over 74 lakh accounts in India in April 2023.
The details were furnished as part of their monthly report published in accordance with the IT Rules 2021. The report covers the period from April 1 to April 30, 2023, and details the measures taken by WhatsApp in response to grievances received from users in India, accounts actioned for violating laws or terms of service, and orders received from the Grievance Appellate Committee (GAC). “In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our report for the month of April 2023. This user-safety report contains details of the user complaints received and the corresponding action taken by WhatsApp, as well as WhatsApp’s own preventive actions to combat abuse on our platform. As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 7.4 million accounts in the month of April and over 2.4 million of these accounts were proactively banned, before any reports from users,” WhatsApp’s spokesperson said.
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Meanwhile, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced a new WhatsApp feature called ‘Chat Lock’ to make users’ most intimate conversations even more private.
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This feature lets you protect your most intimate conversations with a password and secures them in a separate folder. When someone messages you and you have that chat locked, the sender’s name and the content of the message will also be hidden.
Zuckerberg’s announcement read, “We’re excited to bring to you a new feature we’re calling Chat Lock, which lets you protect your most intimate conversations behind one more layer of security.”
“Locking a chat takes that thread out of the inbox and puts it behind its own folder that can only be accessed with your device password or biometric, like a fingerprint. It also automatically hides the contents of that chat in notifications too,” he added.
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