For those who are unaware, currently it is only possible to share files up to 100MB due…reports Asian Lite News
Meta-owned encrypted messaging service WhatsApp is reportedly working on a new feature that will allow users to share bigger-sized files and media with others over their platform.
According to a WABetaInfo report, WhatsApp will soon start testing the “Media File Size” feature in Argentina which will allow users to share media files up to 2GB in size. The feature will initially be limited to Beta testers in Argentina.
As for the feature, it will soon be available on both Android and iOS devices of Beta testers in Argentina.
For those who are unaware, currently it is only possible to share files up to 100MB due.
WhatsApp recently started rolling out the much-awaited multi-device support for all users.
Till now, the feature has been available to users under WhatsApp’s opt-in beta testing programme. Now, according to WABetainfo, the update will roll out to iOS users this month, followed by an Android release next month.
With the new update, your primary device will not have to remain online in order to access the platform.
Viewing live location is not possible on paired devices. Creating and viewing broadcast lists or sending messages with link previews from WhatsApp Web cannot be performed on the secondary devices.
The company said that it also received 495 grievance reports in the same month from the country and took action on 24 of those in January….reports Asian Lite News
Meta-owned WhatsApp on Tuesday said that it banned 1,858,000 bad accounts in India in the month of January in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021.
The company said that it also received 495 grievance reports in the same month from the country and took action on 24 of those in January.
“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we’ve published our eighth monthly report for the month of January 2022,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.
“As captured in the latest Monthly Report, WhatsApp banned over 1.8 million accounts in the month of January,” the spokesperson added.
The company said that data shared highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between January 1 to January 31 using the abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance to negative feedback received from users via its “Report” feature.
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services,” the spokesperson said.
“Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and other state of the art technology, data scientists and experts, and in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform,” the company added.
Meta (formerly Facebook) also took down over 11.6 million pieces of content across 13 policies for Facebook and over 3.2 million pieces of content across 12 policies for Instagram in the month of January.
Under the new IT rules 2021, big digital and social media platforms — with more than 5 million users — have to publish monthly compliance reports.
Meta also received 534 reports for Facebook through the Indian grievance mechanism from December 1 to December 31, and responded to all of these reports, spanning from fake profiles to harassment/abusive content and hacked accounts…reports Asian Lite News
Meta-owned WhatsApp on Tuesday said that it has banned 2,079,000 accounts in India in the month of December in compliance with the new IT Rules, 2021.
The company said that it also received 528 grievance reports in the same month from the country and took action on 24 of those.
“In accordance with the IT Rules 2021, we have published our seventh monthly report for the month of December,” a WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement.
“As captured in the latest monthly report, WhatsApp banned over 2 million accounts in the month of December,” the spokesperson added.
The company said that data shared highlights the number of Indian accounts banned by WhatsApp between December 1 to December 31 using the aforementioned abuse detection approach, which also includes action taken in furtherance to negative feedback received from users via our “Report” feature.
“WhatsApp is an industry leader in preventing abuse, among end-to-end encrypted messaging services,” the spokesperson said.
“Over the years, we have consistently invested in Artificial Intelligence and another state of the art technology, data scientists and experts, and in processes, in order to keep our users safe on our platform,” it added.
Meanwhile, Meta on Monday said it took down over 19.3 million pieces of bad content across 13 categories on Facebook and over 2.4 million pieces of such content across 12 categories on Instagram in December in compliance with the new IT Rules 2021.
Meta also received 534 reports for Facebook through the Indian grievance mechanism from December 1 to December 31, and responded to all of these reports, spanning from fake profiles to harassment/abusive content and hacked accounts.
Of the other 95 reports where the specialised review was needed on Facebook, Meta took action on 28 of those.
Payment through WhatsApp is now live using UPI platform. This will greatly add to the level of convenience for the over 400 million WhatsApp users in India…reports Asian Lite News.
The JioMart-WhatsApp collaboration resulted in a revolution in consumer ease, according to Akash Ambani, Director & Head of Strategy, Jio Platforms. WhatsApp’s easy-to-use, intuitive interface helped remove customer inhibitions and overcame barriers to technology encouraging more and more customer participation. “Digital shopping is now just an extension of messaging via WhatsApp to JioMart,” he added.
“We believe that small businesses are the bedrock of our country’s economic backbone. The pandemic really brought home the truth that small merchant shops, retailers, and small businesses urgently needed to convert their physical brick and mortar stores to digital storefronts,” mentioned Isha Ambani, Director, Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, underlining the motivation behind JioMart’s collaboration with WhatsApp as pandemic broke to support small businesses through e-commerce solutions.
Isha Ambani, Director, Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, and Akash Ambani, Director & Head of Strategy, Jio Platforms were speaking with Marne Levine, Chief Business Officer, Meta at the Fuel For India 2021 event, on how India’s small business owners and entrepreneurs have taken the pandemic as a challenge to reinvent themselves.
JioMart has a retailer network of over half-a-million, which is growing every day. Jio and Reliance Retail are adding more and more features to the JioMart app to create greater value to the small retailers, while ensuring greater convenience to final consumer. “It means that we are moving closer to my father’s vision of enabling millions of small retailers to become digital first via Jio and JioMart, which for us is a really motivating factor,” said Isha Ambani.
Sharing the future plans for the JioMart — WhatsApp collaboration to continue adding more features Akash Ambani said, “We intend to build out native features that will not only help users shop seamlessly on WhatsApp but will also have help retailers increase stock assortments, improve margins and get them closer to perhaps a larger base of customers, like never before.”
Payment through WhatsApp is now live using UPI platform. This will greatly add to the level of convenience for the over 400 million WhatsApp users in India.
WhatsApp.
With Jio and Meta teams working together, more avenues of collaboration are coming up. Jio on WhatsApp, for example, is now set to simplify the entire ‘Prepaid Recharge’ process. “It is really exciting how the end-to-end experience for Recharge through WhatsApp along with the ability to make payments can potentially make the lives of millions of Jio subscribers much more convenient,” said Akash Ambani.
India is in the midst of one of the most dynamic social and economic transformations the world has ever seen. Today, more than 700 million people in India have access to the Internet — and that access is fueling the creation of innovative new enterprises, and connecting people in all-new ways.
India is rapidly becoming a global hub for innovation, leading the way and setting an example for so many other countries to follow — especially in a post-pandemic world.
Fuel For India 2021 is the second edition of Facebook India’s annual flagship event to fuel aspirations of a billion Indians. It is a virtual event packed with stories of grit, passion, and purpose, all powering a new future for the country – stories that are scripting India’s tomorrow.
The Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoAHP) is showcasing a number of smart services at GITEX Technology Week 2021, including the issuing of birth certificates using WhatsApp…reports Asian Lite News
The new service aims to enrich customer experiences and improve communication channels with the public using a smooth and simplified methodology based on advanced systems and international best practices. It is also in line with the ministry’s plans to support the smart government objectives.
The new WhatsApp service is part of a package of services being showcased at GITEX Technology Week, running from October 17 to 21 at the Dubai World Trade Centre.
WhatsApp.
The new feature relies on artificial intelligence techniques to respond to customer inquiries through the “virtual assistant”, which can learn and comprehend their needs based on their inquiries.
The virtual assistant can also analyse and evaluate customer needs according to the available data, then make the necessary decision to answer and respond accurately to their inquiries and complete transactions conveniently.
The virtual assistant is also able to distinguish registered users and interact with the customer based upon the information provided, retrieve stored data from the user’s profile and end the conversation in an interactive manner.
The service was developed according to international best standards to maintain the privacy of customers, where all messages exchanged are encrypted to ensure the highest levels of security and reliability.
“Taking part at GITEX Technology Week is yet another opportunity to showcase the ministry’s latest innovative services, developed to ensure the comfort and satisfaction of its customers. The ministry has designed a number of online services and smart applications to facilitate customers access to its numerous services,” said Samir Al Khoury, Director of IT Department, MoHAP.
Al Khoury added that that ministry is doing its utmost to consolidate its digital systems, as part of its ongoing efforts to support the smart transformation process, in which it has made great strides.
Al Khoury made it clear that the interactive chat via WhatsApp can also serve customers who inquire about other services, to enhance the accuracy and effectiveness of communication channels thanks to the artificial intelligence techniques that can raise the serviceability to better meet customer needs and help them access the integrated smart services package.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users, including in India, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms, reports Asian Lite News
Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday apologised to the millions of users who faced hours’ worth of disruption in accessing the Facebook family of apps – Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp – from Monday night. Expressing his regret for the inconvenience, Zuckerberg took to Facebook following the disruption to let users know that the social media platforms are gradually coming back online now and that people should be able to access it after the nearly six-hour disruption that had the social media users in a standstill.
“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now,” said Mark Zuckerberg from his personal account on Facebook. “Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp came back online only in the early hours of Tuesday, after nearly six hours of an outage that partially paralysed the giant social media network on the internet. The Facebook family of apps went dark on Monday evening (around noon Eastern Time), in what the website monitoring group Downdetector said was the largest such failure the platform had ever seen.
Internet entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, media magnate, philanthropist, and the co-founder of Facebook, is having a rough time with his media empire – especially in view of the high-profile lawsuits that his company is involved in as well as the recent technical snag. This outage was the second blow to the social media giant in as many days after a whistleblower on Sunday accused the company of repeatedly prioritising profit over clamping down on hate speech and misinformation.
Shares of Facebook, which has nearly 2 billion daily active users, fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, amid a broader selloff in technology stocks. Facebook, which is the second-largest digital advertising platform in the world, was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenues per hour during the outage, according to estimates from ad measurement firm Standard Media Index.
In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
People took to DownDetector as they were welcomed with “sorry something went wrong” error message from Facebook and Instagram.
The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.
Facebook shares tank
Meanwhile, shares of Facebook fell 4.9 per cent on Monday, their biggest daily drop since last November, and according to ad measurement firm Standard Media Index, Facebook was losing about $545,000 in US ad revenue per hour during the outage. Some of Facebook’s internal applications, including the company’s own email system, were also hit. Bloomberg reported that Twitter and Reddit users also said that employees at the company’s Menlo Park, California, campus were unable to access offices and conference rooms that required a security badge.
Internal routing mistake
Several Facebook employees, who declined to be named, as saying that they believed that the outage was caused by an internal routing mistake to an internet domain. The failures of internal communication tools and other resources that depend on that same domain in order to work added to the issue, they said. According to several security experts, the Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram disruption could be the result of an internal mistake and added that sabotage by an insider would be theoretically possible. “Facebook basically locked its keys in its car,” tweeted Jonathan Zittrain, director of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer at Facebook, told Wired that the cause of the issue is “probably a bad configuration or code push to the network management system,” “This isn’t supposed to happen,” Stamos added. “Facebook’s outage appears to be caused by DNS; however that’s a just symptom of the problem,” Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyberthreat intelligence company Bad Packets, told Wired. The fundamental issue, Mursch says—and other experts agree—is that Facebook has withdrawn the so-called Border Gateway Protocol route that contains the IP addresses of its DNS nameservers.
BREAKING: Mark Zuckerberg Loses $7 Billion in Net Worth as Facebook Stock Falls https://t.co/S8eHrHQ97U
Several internet infrastructure experts told Wired that the likeliest answer was a misconfiguration on Facebook’s part. “It appears that Facebook has done something to their routers, the ones that connect the Facebook network to the rest of the internet,” John Graham-Cumming, CTO of internet infrastructure company Cloudflare, said.
Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again….reports Asian Lite News
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.
Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger went down for millions of users, including in India, on Monday evening, as they were unable to send or receive messages on social media platforms.
“We are aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We are working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience,” Andy Stone, Facebook communications executive said in a tweet.
We’re aware that some people are having trouble accessing our apps and products. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible, and we apologize for any inconvenience.
According to DownDetector, a website that tracks WhatsApp outages, 40 per cent users were unable to download the app, 30 per cent had trouble in sending messages and 22 per cent had problems with the web version.
People took to Twitter to report the problems they were facing with Facebook family apps, including posting memes and GIFs.
“Sorry, something went wrong. We’re working on it and we’ll get it fixed as soon as we can,” a message on the Facebook website read.
“All of us coming to Twitter to see if Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook are really down,” a user tweeted.
“Everyone rushing to Twitter to see if WhatsApp is actually down,” another tweeted.
“Instagram down, Facebook down, WhatsApp down. You know who’s in-charge now?” another user posted.
Currently, there is no comment from the social media giant about what may be causing the problem or when these sites will be operational again.
In April, Facebook and Instagram went down for millions of users for a couple of hours in various parts of the world. The outage was the second in less than a month for the social networking giant.
People took to DownDetector as they were welcomed with “sorry something went wrong” error message from Facebook and Instagram.
The outage appeared to affect Facebook’s internal websites as well, famed developer Jane Wong noted in a tweet.
Says, requiring messaging apps to “trace” chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, reports Asian Lite News
Taking the user privacy war to the court over new IT rules, Facebook-owned WhatsApp on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Delhi High Court, saying that user privacy is in its DNA and requiring messaging apps to “trace” chats undermines people’s right to privacy.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had asked social media platforms to abide by the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 by May 25, or face strict action.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said that requiring messaging apps to “trace” chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp.
“It would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy. We have consistently joined civil society and experts around the world in opposing requirements that would violate the privacy of our users,” the spokesperson stressed.
The company said that in the meantime, “we will also continue to engage with the Government of India on practical solutions aimed at keeping people safe, including responding to valid legal requests for the information available to us”.
The Indian government was yet to react to the lawsuit.
The tussle between Twitter, WhatsApp and Facebook and the Union government has reached its nadir, with cops raiding Twitter offices in the pandemic earlier this week over the ToolKit controversy.
WhatsApp has gone to the court as the deadline to comply with the new IT (intermediary) rules meant for big social media platforms in India ended on Tuesday.
WhatsApp said that new rules infringe on users’ privacy.
WhatsApp has also gone ahead with implementing its controversial user privacy policy from May 15, clearing stating that “we will maintain this approach until at least the forthcoming PDP (personal data protection) law comes into effect”.
When the concept of “traceability” was first proposed in early 2019, dozens of organisations wrote to the Indian government about how such a provision would violate the privacy of Indian users.
The IT rules published earlier this year, in addition to calling for “traceability” risk criminal penalties for non-compliance.
WhatsApp has consistently opposed legal action that would break end-to-end encryption. The company is currently fighting the same before the Supreme Court of Brazil on a similar matter.
“We also do not believe traceability can be imposed in a way that cannot be spoofed or modified, leading to new ways for people to be framed for things they did not say or do. Such massive data collection also makes messaging platforms inherently less secure by opening up more avenues for hacking,” WhatsApp had said earlier.
The MeitY had announced its draft new IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules for social media platforms on February 25.
As per the new rules, the social media platforms will have to remove offending content within 36 hours after a government directive or a legal order.
The new rules mandate that the intermediaries, including social media intermediaries, must establish a grievance redressal mechanism for receiving/resolving complaints from the users or victims.
On the user privacy policy, the Facebook-owned platform with over 400 million users in the country has defended its position, saying that it continues to engage with the government to resolve the issue.
WhatsApp said it has sent a reply to the notice by MeitY after the ministry directed the Facebook-owned platform to withdraw its controversial user privacy policy.
In its fresh notice to the company, the MeitY told WhatsApp to respond to its concerns by May 25…reports Asian Lite News.
WhatsApp said it has sent a reply to the notice by Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) after the ministry directed the Facebook-owned platform to withdraw its controversial user privacy policy.
In its fresh notice to the company, the MeitY told WhatsApp to respond to its concerns by May 25.
A WhatsApp spokesperson said in a statement that the company has responded to the Government of India’s letter and assured them that the privacy of users “remains our highest priority”.
“As a reminder, the recent update does not change the privacy of people’s personal messages. Its purpose is to provide additional information about how people can interact with businesses if they choose to do so,” the spokesperson said.
Noting that many Indian users depend on WhatsApp for communicating on a daily basis, the ministry had said in the notice that it is irresponsible for WhatsApp to leverage its position in the Indian market to impose unfair terms and conditions.
As per the ministry, the changes to WhatsApp privacy policy and the manner of introducing the changes undermines the sacrosanct values of informational privacy, data security and user choice and harms the rights and interests of Indian citizens.
The WhatsApp spokesperson said that the company “will not limit the functionality of how WhatsApp works in the coming weeks.
WhatsApp. (Photo: IANS)
“Instead, we will continue to remind users from time to time about the update as well as when people choose to use relevant optional features, like communicating with a business that is receiving support from Facebook,” the spokesperson added.
“We will maintain this approach until at least the forthcoming PDP (personal data protection) law comes into effect”.
The MeitY communication had noted that WhatsApp’s new privacy policy is a violation of several provisions of the existing Indian laws and rules.
WhatsApp has rolled out its privacy policy globally including in India, where it has more than 400 million users. The users will not immediately lose their accounts or face curtailed functionalities, but they will have to eventually go through limited functions if they fail to accept the new norms in the due course of time.
After persistent reminders, the users will encounter limited functionality on WhatsApp until they accept the updates.
