WhatsApp: Grateful to IT minister for acknowledgment of our safety efforts – Times of India

Meta-owned WhatsApp has said that the company is grateful for the acknowledgment of its continuous commitment to user safety in India by IT and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. Vaishnaw on Tuesday launched the Sanchar Saathi portal that aims to help mobile users track their lost or stolen mobile phones. During the event, the minister mentioned WhatsApp’s cooperation with the government to ensure customer safety.
“We have actively engaged with WhatsApp and they have agreed that customer safety is most important. All the OTT platforms are actively cooperating to deregister the users which have been detected as fraud users,” Vaishnaw said. The minister was responding to the measures that the government is taking to check fraud through calls on WhatsApp.

Working consistently to improve user security
“We are grateful for the minister’s acknowledgment of WhatsApp’s continuous commitment to user safety. We have been actively engaging with the government to consistently ensure a safe and secure user experience, including weeding out bad-actors from the platform. WhatsApp is a leader among end-to-end encrypted services in protecting user safety and we continue to provide several in-built safety tools like Block & Report, Two-step verification, among others, along with regularly driving user safety education and awareness,” said the company in a statement.
“We are grateful for the minister’s acknowledgment of WhatsApp’s continuous commitment to user safety. We have been actively engaging with the government to consistently ensure a safe and secure user experience, including weeding out bad-actors from the platform,” said a WhatsApp spokesperson.

Since the last few weeks, WhatsApp users in India have been inundated with international scam calls in India. These spam calls have been coming from international numbers mostly from African and Southeast Asian countries.
Last week, in a statement WhatsApp said that it has ramped up its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) systems to bring down such incidents significantly. “Our new enforcement will reduce the current calling rate by at least 50 per cent and we expect to be able to control the current incidence effectively. We will continue to work relentlessly towards ensuring a safe experience for our users,” a company spokesperson had said in a statement.