Brands Are Spamming WhatsApp Users in India, Facebook's Largest Market (techcrunch.com) 23
As Meta makes deeper inroads with businesses on WhatsApp, its biggest bet to monetize the instant messaging app with over 2 billion users, we are getting an early glimpse at how user experience might change on the free app. It's not great. From a report: Scores of people in India, WhatsApp's largest market by users with over 500 million accounts, have complained about getting too many spam texts from businesses in recent months. WhatsApp, which quickly displaced the SMS app in the country by offering free texts, is increasingly looking like that SMS app, users say. Thousands of brands in India have signed up for WhatsApp, consistently succeeding in reaching eyeballs of more than 80% users, a person familiar with the matter said, a figure miles ahead of campaigns run on emails and traditional texts. What's more annoying is that even after users have blocked some businesses, many return to the inbox from different phone numbers, according to author's account.
Brilliant move (Score:5, Funny)
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Have you actually read anything above or in the article? Whatsapp doesn't show then ads. It's just that businesses started using whatsapp to send spam.
Spam & junk-texts are everywhere, not just Ind (Score:1)
Who is not getting spam? That would be the worthy story: "Nation X has almost no spam! Experts shocked."
Donald should threaten to launch missiles at spammers, I might even vote for him them, despite coup attempt and all. It probably won't do any good, but he knows how to appeal to one's frustrated inner cave-person. Ooga Booga, Bigly Bonk Spammer!
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Come on Meta, mess it up bigtime and move folks onto Signal https://signal.org/en/ [signal.org] .
I am still hoping there is a way for phones to directly message each other without needing a central server, or one of the tech giants "mediating". I know in Signal the design is for a central server still, even
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for Whatsapp I have *never* had spam in the USA-UK market so this is news-worthy to me
That probably because WhatsApp isn't that big in the US? From what I heard, people mostly use iMessenger and SMS there.
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WA is ubiquitous in the UK and I haven;t been spammed in the many years I've had it (before or after Facebook bought it). I've had the few dodgy messages, but that's lead to three numbers in my block list (two +86 and one +62).
Telegram on the other hand: been on it about a year. In the past week alone got added two very active spam channels. One was about bitcoin or something similar crypto related. Funny, both incidences shortly after 6pm and tens of messages in the time it took me to cycle home from w
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Here in Brazil WhatsApp is also ubiquitous. Now and then I get spam, but it's quite rare, and comes from international numbers. I guess the regulatory framework here is rigorous enough it only allows opt-in business messaging, not opt-out.
Telegram has a setting to disable 3rd parties adding you to channels. If you use the Android version (no idea about the iOS one) it's in "Hamburguer / Settings / Privacy and Security / Groups & Channels". Change the "Who can add me to group chats?" option from "Everybo
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Yep, that's true...I'm in the US and I didn't ever hear about WhatsApp till fairly recently.
I don't get it...what's wrong with the text you get with your phone plan?
Text doesn't cost you any extra, and SMS is pretty much the same everywhere, no?
Most everyone I interact with has iPhones so, we're us
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I guess I could understand Signal since it is encrypted....is WhatsApp? If so, is the encryption the primary reason folks in other countries are using it?
It uses the same encryption Signal uses, although some metadata still leak for ease of use, so it's easier to use than Signal, while keeping a huge part of its privacy.
The main reason though is that back in the day SMS was very expensive, one paid per SMS sent and received, and phone plans at most offered things like "10 SMS messages per day for free included in your basic plan!!!" WhatsApp provided a 100% free SMS-like experience and so people adopted it in droves, to the point it became the default, even
free software from Meta (Score:4)
You installed free software from Meta and you did not expect to be targeted? You obviously were not thinking.
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Yup.
If it's "free" then YOU are the product.
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Not quite. It's not Meta doing the advertising, it's businesses merely using Whatsapp merely to reach spam targets.
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Does it matter who does the advertising? Wanna bet that Meta sells data on users that can be used for targeting?
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Do you live in the EU or California? You should do an info request and find out for yourself. If you are running a Meta app on your phone then they know plenty about you, without any app content at all. Meta knows where your device connects from an when. Meta knows plenty without seeing your messages.
Simple solution (Score:2)
Whatsapp should add an option to block messages from unknown numbers.
Good. (Score:2)
Maybe now they will stop calling me.
and no filtering client, of course (Score:3)
And of course there's no way to install a better client with more spam filtering like there is with SMS (or email). Use anything with a closed protocol and client, and you're just a captive audience for whatever the people who own the protocol and client want to show you.
Whatsapp pretty common in my country (Score:2)