WhatsApp reportedly monitoring spam

WhatsApp is reportedly watching spam closely. As we already know, chats are end-to-end encrypted making it WhatsApp impossible to read or view them. So the company had to look for different ways to detect spam. The most visible measure is that users can flag messages from unknown numbers as spam. However, WhatsApp is doing more against unwanted messages.

According to WABetaInfo, spam messages are those which a user sends in bulk to its list of contacts. "A spammer never sends spam messages to a single contact, but he is used to sending them to multiple users, selecting them in his contacts list, picking these data from the internet or from some registration services. These messages may contain unwanted advertising and fake news, and they often invite you to forward the message to your contacts," the website said.

The amount of messages that a user sends per minute is monitored continuously. With an extremely high number of messages per minute the user will be marked as spam. By doing this, the chance of unjustified bans is still relatively large, so WhatsApp has also developed an advanced spam detection system.

By analyzing and comparing data, such as internet provider, phone number and the network, WhatsApp tries to recognize patterns. If spam, for example, is always send via the same internet provider, this is considered as suspicious. The company also looks at where the traffic is coming from.

If users mark certain messages as spam, but they have not been seen by the spam detection system, WhatsApp will look at how this can automatically be marked as spam in the future.

With the analysis of metadata WhatsApp takes into account the privacy of users. A balance is always made between privacy and necessary data to detect spam. The company tries to keep the number of data as low as possible: if certain metadata adds nothing to spam detection, it is not collected.