WhatsApp is putting AI to good use and plans to help people avoid falling for dangerous online scams. The platform is testing a feature called Scam Detection which will be an AI-powered tool that will be used
to scan through chats and alert users if they smell a scam brewing in the background.
Using AI to detect scams in WhatsApp immediately brings attention to its famed end-to-end encryption security which becomes a suspect when AI starts filtering through your messages and content to detect such issues. WhatsApp already caters to different AI tools with Meta AI that helps you edit text, generate images and plan a travel itinerary.
How does WhatsApp’s AI weapon to fight scams work?
WhatsApp is offering Scam Detection as a feature that can be enabled from the settings. Once you do that, the platform will download an AI model on the device and analyse chats from unknown users to check for possible scam risks.
The company says it is using pre-trained data to help the AI model detect and study these messages and not completely going through your messages to make sure that it is not dangerous to read or open.
There are a lot of technical and complex readings done by the AI model, which, WhatsApp assures, is not going to affect how secure the messages are and will be forever. Once the content has been red-flagged based on the data metrics by the AI model, WhatsApp will show the users a warning message and give them the option to block or report the contact.
The platform will also give them the control over how to act on such messages, and even mark the chat as trusted, something we do for emails and the warning will go away. “All inference happens on-device and no message content leaves the user device for classification. The minimal telemetry needed to measure whether the feature is working,” Meta confirms the details in a post.
The company has not shared a timeline for the public release of this feature but we expect once the tests are clear and stable, the official rollout will happen for everyone.
