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WhatsApp has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently. Earlier this month, the government condemned the spread of fake news on the Facebook messaging app and urged it to take drastic action to prevent these incidents, which led to violent incidents in the country. In the most recent development that was discovered, WhatsApp would have opened tests of its Suspicious Link feature in the new Android beta. The feature was introduced with the 2.18.204 version of the application, but was only available for a small number of beta users. Now, however, it can be found on all phones running the beta version of WhatsApp for Android version 2.18.221.
According to a report by WABetaInfo, a reliable source for all things WhatsApp, with this feature, WhatsApp Beta on Android gets the opportunity to mark a "suspicious link" whenever a contact sends you one. This update should warn unsuspecting users of a suspicious link before opening it. WhatsApp will also alert the user once again by searching for unusual characters if they are trying to open the link. Two options, Open Link and Go Back, will be provided. The suspicious character is highlighted in the dialog box that appears when you try to open the link. The new suspicious link detection feature is currently not available on iOS and Windows Phone but will be deployed in future updates.
The report states that all links are evaluated and tagged locally, and that no data is sent or obtained from WhatsApp and Facebook servers. This is due to the end-to-end encryption of the messaging platform that was announced in November 2014.
Although this new feature acts against phishing, the theft of identity and possibly to be even spam, it can be ineffective in the fight against false news. There are several websites, like Infowars in the United States, that do not have special characters in the URL, but that are reputed to spread conspiracy theories and unverified or false stories like news legitimate.
Earlier this week, WhatsApp announced that it was planning to limit message transmission capabilities for Indian users as a result of crowd incidents in the country. The plan includes a lower limit of 5 messages and deleting the "fast forward" shortcut for multimedia messages. The company also claimed that Indian users were transmitting more messages and videos than any other market in the world.
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