Last Update: February 23, 2023, 08:54 IST
The LocalCircles survey claims to have received over 51,000 responses from citizens located across 351 districts in India.
An online survey conducted by LocalCircles in India found that 95% of surveyed WhatsApp users received one or more harassing messages every day, while 41% received four or more such messages.
Online survey firm LocalCircles on Wednesday said that around 76 per cent of the respondents claimed that they have seen an increase in strange calls or SMS based on their interactions with WhatsApp business accounts and their activity on Facebook or Instagram.
According to the survey conducted between February 1-20, 95 percent of WhatsApp users in the survey conducted by LocalCircles India indicated that they received one or more harassing messages every day, with 41 percent claiming they received four or more such messages daily.
When contacted, a spokesperson for Meta said that WhatsApp has systems in place that make it swift for WhatsApp to stop sending messages to a business when people respond that they have a low-quality experience.
“If a business receives overly negative feedback, we may limit or remove the business’ access to WhatsApp,” said a Meta spokesperson.
LocalCircles said that in order to understand whether users were having such experiences based on the privacy policy change and to determine the magnitude of such instances, it asked respondents whether they had received unwanted commercial messages on WhatsApp. are seeing an increase, based on their interactions with WhatsApp business users. or your activity on Facebook or Instagram.
“Nearly three quarters, or 76 percent, of the 12,215 WhatsApp users who responded to this question said they are seeing an increase in harassing or unwanted commercial messages based on their interactions with WhatsApp Business accounts and their activity on Facebook/Instagram . Apart from WhatsApp, by meta,” the survey report said.
The survey claims to have received over 51,000 responses from citizens located in 351 districts of India.
LocalCircles said the survey results show that most of the WhatsApp users surveyed are using tools available to them such as blocking or archiving and still spam messages continue indicating that senders are also changing numbers. or there are so many of them that the danger persists.
“Of the 12,673 respondents to this question, a majority, or 73 percent, indicated that they exercise the option to block numbers from which unwanted commercial messages come,” the report said.
A Meta spokesperson said that user choice is important and offers them the option to block a business account.
“We want to share that at WhatsApp, users’ choice is at the core of what we do. Messaging is the new way of doing business that is better than SMS, e-mail and phone, which have become overloaded and spammy. Our rule is whether or not people want to speak to a business is our users’ choice,” the spokesperson said.
The spokesperson shared that it continuously works with businesses to ensure that messages are helpful and expected.
“We only allow businesses to send a certain number of messages per day… We recently added a simple way for businesses to opt out of receiving certain types of messages within chats for customers,” the spokesperson said. added.”
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)