WhatsApp proved to be quite a brave company last year, when in April 2016 they rolled out end-to-end encryption for all its users (which are more than 1 billion people all around the world). In comparison, Facebook, which is the parent company of WhatsApp, was more cautious and only included an opt-in encryption on its Messenger feature. However, the complete approach WhatsApp adopted has a cost – it raised political and practical concerns.
One of these important concerns was the way in which they were going to identify spam on the platform. They could become a safe haven for scammers, for example, which would definitely harm the app and make people quit using it. WhatsApp solution? According to Matt Jones, who works as an engineer at the company, they are using spam-detection techniques that don’t rely on the content.
Instead of checking the contents of the message, WhatsApp looks at the behavior of the user in order to see if there is spam involved or not. Up until now, it seems that this strategy has been successful. Jones declared that after releasing the end-to-end encryption, the company identified and eliminated 75% of the spam content.
The techniques they use may be familiar to experts in the fight against spam. For example, the company looks at the number of messages sent by a user in a minute and it the number is really high, it will flag the user as spam. Another tactic is to have a look at the information about the ISP (Internet Service Provider), phone number and the phone network and to compare the data to previous reports about spam.
If there is any coincidence, most likely the user is a spammer. Once they locate a spammer, the company analyzes his previous actions and to check if they had suspicious activity on their account before.
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