Grateful of IT Minister's acknowledgment of our user safety efforts in India: WhatsApp

Meta-owned WhatsApp on Tuesday said they are grateful for the acknowledgment of its continuous commitment to user safety in India by IT and Railways Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, after the company faced scrutiny last week as international spam calls flooded the users.

Vaishnaw on Tuesday launched the Sanchar Saathi portal, on the World Telecommunication and Information Society Day, that will help millions of people track their lost or stolen mobile phones, and mentioned WhatsApp's cooperation with the government to ensure customer safety.

"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.

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," the spokesperson added.

WhatsApp last week said it took action on the growing menace of International scam calls in India, after the government took cognisance of the issue and announced to send a notice to the platform over the issue.

The platform, which has over 500 million users in the country, said 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.

These spam calls with international numbers, mostly from African and Southeast Asian countries, along with fake messages from unknown users, flooded WhatsApp users in India.

Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday announced a new WhatsApp feature called Chat Lock to safeguard intimate chats.