Spam Detection And Verified Business Messaging In Messages To Be Rolled Out By Google


12/13/2019



Two new features for its Messages app for the Android operating systems are set to be tolled out by Google, the United States based search engine giant announced on Thursday. The two features are designed to help the message users of Google to weed out any form of annoying messages and to know whether the individual one is texting is a real person or not.
 
One of the features will be available in the form of spam detection for Google’s users in the United States where the service will first be launched in next year. If the soon to be launched new messaging feature is able to detect a suspected spam message, a warning would be shown to the user where the user will have the option of selecting whether the message is spam or not, Google says. While this new feature will be turned on automatically, the users will be notified about its availability once it is rolled out by Google. Using this new feature, users would be able to report spam at any time as well as be able to block the conversation if the spam messages don’t stop coming.
 
Those phone numbers from which spam messages are being sent and received by a user from people who are not present in the contacts list will be temporarily stored by Google if the spam detection feature is turned on. Google says that this feature will help users to better identify spammers. However the company said that the phone numbers that it would store temporarily would not be linked to any individual user.
 
The service of Verified SMS for messages a user sends to certain businesses will also be rolled out at the same time by Google. According to this new feature, in the cases when a user shares messages a verified business, the user would be able to see the name of the business, its official logo registered with Google along with a verification badge. All of these would be available in the message thread. Messages will be verified on a per-message basis.
 
According to Google “among the first brands” that will send messages with Verified SMS are 1-800 Flowers, Banco Bradesco, Kayak, Payback, and SoFi. The new features will also include the Google Identity Verification and Google Pay services. Google plans to roll out its new Verified SMS service in nine countries, which include Brazil, Canada, France, India, Mexico, Philippines, Spain, the UK, and the US.
 
(Source:www.theverge.com)