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Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, continues its fight for all sexual abuse videos being shared in India. Despite WhatsApp's attempts to stop this type of content, last March dozens of WhatsApp groups were found in which hundreds of videos with sexual content of child abuse were shared.
These groups have been identified through third-party WhatsApp applications that are banned from the Play Store. The problem is that from these applications you can send content to other users who use WhatsApp's own application.
How do WhatsApp users avoid being detected?
As Nitish Chandan, a cybersecurity specialist, comments, these members are linked to private groups through links and use numbers virtual to avoid detection. But this is not the first time that WhatsApp has been involved in a framework like this with sexual content of minors. In December another investigation removed several such groups, which used a method similar to the current ones to share content without being detected.
Currently there are many groups that exist with videos about sexual content and child abuse. WhatsApp assures that it offers zero tolerance for this type of practice as well as fake news and all kinds of sexual content, but it is incapable of completely eradicating it.WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption makes it very difficult to detect illegal activities and challenge those responsible.
The app is already using advanced tools like Microsoft's PhotoDNA to scan users' profile photos for matches that can detect these groups. Some specialists say that WhatsApp could establish a follow-up of the metadata of these groups to detect problems earlier and avoid this type of content. We cannot forget that WhatsApp is capable of detecting fake news even without reading the content of the messages.
Although this sexual content is a different problem than fake news it should still be a priority for enforcement in which More than 1.5 billion people communicate every day.
