News & Reviews:   spam

In an effort to prevent increased scams and spam on YouTube Shorts, YouTube will be taking action soon to make links in Shorts comments, descriptions and live feeds unclickable. It will begin on 13 August 2023, to further prevent users from harmful content and malware. 

In case you didn't receive it, a few of us have gotten an SMS from our respective telcos. Starting on 2 July 2023, SMS containing links, requesting personal data and phone numbers will be blocked to prevent online fraud. 

From time to time, we would get scam messages and calls on our phones. While you could always install the Truecaller app, it doesn't work for WhatsApp which scammers tend to use nowadays. However, that could change in the future.

Today, Google announced that the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) will be expanded in Gmail. Introduced in 2021, this new update will now have a checkmark icon from senders to show verifications, just like the blue ticks from Facebook and Twitter.

Google has announced a new feature on Google Voice which adds a red “suspected spam caller” warning for calls that are believed to be spam. This was made so as to protect users from unwanted calls and potentially harmful scams.

Facebook has made a few questionable decisions over the years, both internally in terms of management as well as relating to the platform’s algorithm and features. Well, it seems that Meta’s popular social media platform is at it again, this time by reportedly locking out users who doesn’t activate Facebook Protect out of their Facebook accounts. 

Worse, some users are even saying that they weren’t made aware of the necessity of turning on Facebook Protect. In fact, the only notice they got was from a spam-like email from Facebook titled “Your account requires advanced security from Facebook Protect”.

If you take a look at your smartphone's data storage, there's a good chance that WhatsApp is one of the highest storage space app hoggers, no thanks to the millions of photo and video spams sent by friends and family. Thankfully, the WhatsApp team have finally rolled out a new Storage Management Tool for better and easier file management.

In every family group chat ever, you will always have that one relative that loves sending spam or forwarded messages in the group. But sometimes, you will also get unwanted spam messages from strangers just right after getting a new SIM number. If only there was a law that prohibits this behaviour...except that there is. As recently issued by the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC), you could actually get fined or land yourself in jail for spamming!