With a surprise speech, Mark Zuckerberg, on his official Facebook profile, confirmed several news coming for groups and the upcoming test of the card for the Communities: here are all the news that emerged, and the implications for privacy.
On a crackling afternoon in mid-April, Meta Inc, the parental company that also controls WhatsApp (recently authorized in India to provide support for WhatsApp Pay to a total of 100 million users) announced the entry of the chat app in green in the social dimension (promising “community messaging functions also for Messenger, Facebook and Instagram”) through the Community tab and the launch of many new features for groups.
As known, for some time WhatsApp was developing its own Communities, a sort of bulletin board or group of groups and the moment of the debut came, with the company – as reported by Android Central – which, while not providing a precise timing for the debut, he announced how in the coming months, before launching it globally, he will proceed to test the Community function card. To explain the new aggregative form, the example of schools was made, comparing the groups to those of study, of the classes, of the school bus, of the gym, with the administrator, for example the principal, who will be able to bring together all the groups in a single bulletin board so you can easily send alerts on critical issues or time changes.
According to Meta, there will not be a Community search system, but it will be the admin, that is whoever creates and manages these social forms (also being able to decide to disconnect some groups from a Community) who will be able to invite users who, given the groups included in a Community, they will be able to decide which ones they intend to join and submit a question that will be up to the admins to approve. Furthermore, only the administrators will be able to send messages, here called Warnings, with users who will not only be able to read them but not comment or reply to them, to “avoid overloads”. Furthermore, to prevent the spread of forms of disinformation, the forwarding of messages will be limited to one group at a time.
Another peculiarity of the Communities will be privacy. Like one-to-one or group communications, even those in the Communities will be protected by end-to-end encryption: as a result, interventions in the event of illegal behavior or activities in the Communities, for example to delete the macro group or block users or administrators, will only be possible using unencrypted info, such as user reports or the name and description of the Community. Like today, phone numbers will not be visible to all members of a community, but only to users with whom you share membership in the same group.
In specifying that with the arrival of the Communities the normal location of the groups, now present in the chat screen, will not change, Meta has however promised improvements for the groups, which will be brought to them as a dowry regardless of whether they are part of a Community or not. , with an implementation that will take place “even before” that of the Communities.
In particular, in the groups – in the coming weeks – it will be possible to reply to a message with an emoji, thus avoiding that they are flooded with textual answers: compared to today (100 MB), support for sharing files up to 2 is also being implemented. GB. Administrators are on the verge of being able to delete “problematic messages from everyone’s chats”: finally, the number of people who can participate in a voice call is increasing from the current limit of 8 to 32.