The Indian Government Has Directed WhatsApp To Seek User Consent When They're Added To Groups
You know how annoying it is when relatives add you to family groups without asking you? Then you have to keep receiving those daily ¡°good morning¡± forwards or everyone will talk about how rude you are? Well, that may not be a problem for much longer
We all know how annoying it is when relatives add us to family groups without asking. Then begins the flood of daily "good morning" forwards, followed by discussions on how rude you are when you don't reciprocate. Well, that may not be a problem for much longer.
The Indian government has directed WhatsApp to prevent users from being added to chat groups without their consent. Granted, their motivation for this probably may not have been those 'well-wishing' image forwards, but we'll take what we can get.
Apparently a lot of people have been complaining to government agencies about being added to groups against their will, and they forwarded these complaints to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY). MeitY has reportedly decided to take this up with the messaging app.
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The government body has written to the Facebook-owned company, directing they take action to prevent this possibility in future. One option they have suggested is to ensure the admin has the number of the user they're trying to add already saved in their phonebook. Additionally, they propose, a user that leaves a group twice should not be available to be added a third time.
That does however raise the question of what happens when a twice-leaving user is added again by a different admin, or to a new group created from a different mobile number. MeitY has urged WhatsApp to look into these extreme cases as well.
One possible solution would be to incorporate push notifications into the WhatsApp system, that notifies a user when they're being added to a group. A simple popup with the name of the group and the contact trying to add them would work, along with Accept and Reject buttons, if WhatsApp can work that into their system.
Hopefully, it's something they can provide soon, because I don't like having to delete 50 "Have a good day" motivational posters from my phone memory each week.
