“Horrified” WhatsApp Plans New Features After Fake News Kills 29 In India

It’s unfortunate to hear that social media platforms that were meant to “connect” people are becoming hotbeds of fake news with harrowing consequences.

Fake news regarding child kidnappings, sexual predators, and thieves spreads like fire on social networking apps. And the Facebook-owned WhatsApp is the most prominent in it. All of this has led to lynchings and killing of close to 30 innocent lives in India for past two months.

On Tuesday, India’s electronics and IT ministry issued a statement in which it conveyed “deep disapproval” of such incidents to the senior management of WhatsApp. The statement stated WhatsApp couldn’t “evade accountability and responsibility.”

The government has ordered WhatsApp to contain the spread of such “irresponsible and explosive messages” through the use of appropriate technology.

WhatsApp had acknowledged the chilling issue in a letter sent to the government on Wednesday and said it’s working on changes to fight fake news and hoaxes on its platforms.

In the wake of rising fake news, the company would roll out some labels to help people distinguish between forwarded messages and the ones sent by their contacts. WhatsApp also said that it’s working with Indian researchers to have a better understanding of the problem.

WhatsApp said in the letter that the best way to tackle false news, misinformation, hoaxes is by a collective effort between the government, civil society, and tech companies.

There is no way WhatsApp could be careless about the issue as around 200 million of its active users are living in India. It also has plans to run awareness campaigns in the country.

Is WhatsApp alone at fault?

Due to its userbase, it’s not surprising to see WhatsApp being singled out by the government. But besides blaming some tech company which supposedly can’t read people’s conversations due to their end-to-end encryption, doesn’t the government has its own share of responsibility.

It’s concerning to see how easy it has become to influence people in a country with a population of around 1.3 billion.

One of the big reasons is that technology has arrived too fast in the hands of Indian citizens, without the knowledge required to use it. And that should include not hurting other people. Sadly, the government hasn’t been able to find ways to raise awareness among people. Hopefully, it does before more people lose their lives.

Comments

Chrome Web Browser Will Now Use 10% More RAM With Spectre Fix

A new security feature named ‘Site Isolation’ has been introduced for Google Chrome 67 which would nullify the effects of speculative execution side-channel attacks like Spectre. To put things to the perspective, Spectre is one of the two fundamental design flaws in the modern processors, which allow programs to get access to the data for which it is not authorized. Malicious data can exploit this flaw to steal your password and other personal information. What is Site Isolation? The new Site Isolation feature introduced in Google Chrome 67 brings about a fundamental change to Chrome’s architecture. Now, Chrome has changed how its multi-process architecture worked and different tabs used different render processes. According to the new architecture, Chrome limits each renderer process to a single site. By this separation of processes, Google aims to prevent direct memory reading across different processes to safeguard users’ data. According to G...

Amazon, Reddit And Others Fail To Warn Us About Dumb Passwords

B elieve it or not, there is still a large number of people who use passwords such as “password,” “password123”, “[dog’s name]1” and others along the same lines. And in the era of sophisticated hacking, these passwords are not exactly “safe.” Before me, this is the first thing websites should inform you while setting up a password. But apparently, many big names are not doing enough to encourage non-terrible passwords, according to the new research . Steve Furnell from the University of Plymouth has been keeping tabs on the websites like Amazon, Reddit, and Wikipedia for many years, carrying out similar assessments in 2007, 2011 and 2014. His 2018 survey examined practices of Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Microsoft Live, and Netflix. The study concluded that Amazon had the worst performance among all the names. It nearly accepted every kind of password of any length. On the other hand, Yahoo and Wikip...

Is Microsoft Working On A New “Next-generation OS”? Should I Really Get Excited?

I n an announcement that’ll surely spark the interest of Windows enthusiasts, Synaptics hinted at a new “next-generation” operating system from Microsoft. This announcement took place during a conference, where Synaptics and AMD shared their plans to work together to secure the operating systems with a new kind of fingerprint sensor. Here’s what the press release from Synaptics actually said: Further, the new “biometric security OS” gets a mention again along with Windows Hello. The partnership with AMD will reportedly let Synaptics use FS7600 Match-in-Sensor technology, which is completely isolated from the rest of the system and operating system for extra security. It goes without saying that you need to take this news with an extra pinch of salt than the regular rumors that keep making rounds. The next-gen OS from Microsoft could be merely the next significant Windows 10 upgrade. In case you’re a person who loves to think more positively, ...

Tech Knock

Search This Blog