WhatsApp warns legal action against those who violate its ‘Terms of Service’

Starting December 9 this year, WhatsApp will take legal action against those who misuse the app with bulk messaging, and non-personal use.

WhatsApp updates its terms of app usage. (REUTERS)

To improve the health of its platform, Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp has decided to take legal actions against those who are exploiting the platform by ways of unauthorised usage of the app, that has over 1.5 billion users.

"Beginning on December 7, WhatsApp will take legal action against those we determine are engaged in or assisting others in abuse that violates our Terms of Service, such as automated or bulk messaging or non-personal use, even if that determination is based on information solely available to us off our platform," the company wrote in a post on Wednesday.

The company said WhatsApp is not intended to circulate bulk or automated messaging, both of which have always been a violation of their Terms of Service.

"WhatsApp was designed for private messaging, so we have taken action globally to prevent bulk messaging and enforce limits on how WhatsApp accounts that misuse WhatsApp can be used. We have also stepped up our ability to identify abuse, which helps us ban 2 million accounts globally per month," TechCrunch quoted a WhatsApp spokesperson as saying.

Earlier this year, the platform said that it had built a Machine Learning (ML)-based system to detect and remove users who behaved inappropriately on the app.

The platform said it was able to assess the past dealings with problematic behaviours to ban 20% of bad accounts at the time of registration itself, the report added.