Whatsapp’s new feature on the way; To ban accounts of underage users
Reportedly, Whatsapp is working on a new feature which will prohibit the accounts that don’t meet minimum age requirement.
Reportedly, Whatsapp is currently working on a new feature which aims at restricting accounts that don’t match minimum age limit. Last year, the Facebook owned company updated the age-limit criteria as per the implementation of GDPR. The minimum age for the European users to join Whatsapp is 16 years old. Earlier, the criteria was 13 years old. For non EU users, the age limit is 13 years.
As per the Whatsapp’s terms of service, “You must be at least 13 years old to use our Services (or such greater age required in your country for you to be authorized to use our Services without parental approval). In addition to being of the minimum required age to use our Services under applicable law, if you are not old enough to have authority to agree to our Terms in your country, your parent or guardian must agree to our Terms on your behalf.”
Implementing this new feature, Whatsapp will now verify users’ age limit to ban their accounts.
Now as it is owned by Facebook, the latest beta version of Whatsapp has it’s branding. It says, ‘Whatsapp from Facebook’. The same is applicable for Instagram application as well. This change appeared after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced uniting Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram platforms.
However, the experts have expressed concerns over the unification plans. While some experts believe that this change could impact the end-to-end encryption, one of the most important security features of WhatsApp.
“I’m cautiously optimistic it’s a good thing,” former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos had said. “My fear was that they were going to drop end-to-end encryption.”
Well, it seems to be a great step taken by the organization considering the underage cyber crimes that takes place all over the web.
Stay tuned for further updates.