One lesson that everyone on the Internet knows is that there are a lot of scammers and nefarious individuals out there who will try their best to fool you and get your (probably) hard-earned money. Facebook Messenger is one of the ways in which people are targeted and there are a lot of cases when vulnerable individuals have been tricked. They are now bringing safety notices and other safety tips to help users to not be victimized by these scammers.
If you didn’t know it yet, Messenger is currently in the process of moving to end-to-end encryption, similar to what you’ve been enjoying in other messaging apps like Telegram. And while that will take care of privacy issues, they also want to bring the safety of users to the forefront by using a bit of machine learning to detect scammers and warn you when you receive messages from them. They have already filtered out potential spam or malware, but this is another layer of protection.
If you are contacted by a potential scammer, a safety notice will pop up in your chat and warn you about how to spot suspicious activity. You can then take action by blocking the user or just ignoring them if you’re suspicious enough. This can include people pretending to be a legit friend to just strangers offering amazing sounding deals that may be too good to be true. You will also get regular tips on how to avoid scams.
They are also improving on the ways to keep minors safe from the platform. Aside from limiting contact from adults that they aren’t connected to, they are also using machine learning to spot and disable adults that have inappropriate interactions with children. Now there is also a new feature that will provide educational material for kids below 18 to teach them how to be more careful when interacting with an online stranger.
The safety notice feature and the new encryption system should work well together. But at the end of the day, users will still need to be able to make informed decisions about their conversations on the platform.
