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Messaging giant WhatsApp is experimenting with giving businesses verified accounts on its platform. In an FAQ<\/a> on its website the company notes that some business accounts will be displayed with a green tick badge next to them \u2014 which denotes that WhatsApp has \u201cconfirmed\u201d their phone number belongs to a business account, though it does not specify what kind of checks it\u2019s carrying out to verify businesses.<\/p>\n \u201cWhatsApp business verification is currently limited to a small number of businesses participating in a pilot program,\u201d it further notes.<\/p>\n We\u2019ve reached out to WhatsApp with questions about the verified business accounts and will update this story with any response.<\/p>\n Since ditching its $1 annual service fee under acquiring parent Facebook, WhatsApp has been testing business accounts, with a view to opening up a monetization pipe \u2014 even as CEO Jan Koum has claimed it will not be putting \u201cads in the product\u201d.<\/p>\n In January 2016<\/a>\u00a0Koum said a b2c play was in testing, focused on large corporate customers at that stage.\u00a0By August<\/a> 2016 WhatsApp said it would be letting businesses onto its platform by the end of the year, including allowing them to send marketing messages to users (um, ads anyone?) \u2014 at the same time as announcing a big shift in its privacy policy<\/a>, pushing users to link their WhatsApp accounts with their Facebook identities.<\/p>\n The privacy policy u-turn included sharing information for ad-targeting purposes \u2014 positioning WhatsApp to be able to target relevant businesses at users based on shared and linked data about their Facebook likes, usage and so on. (Which is how an end-to-end encrypted messaging platform<\/a> can still know everything its users care about \u2014 and thus take steps to monetize via targeted marketing.)<\/p>\n The controversial decision to link WhatsApp and Facebook user activity led to a $122M fine in Europe<\/a>, earlier this year, after regulators judged Facebook had provided \u201cincorrect or misleading\u201d information at the time of the acquisition (although Facebook claimed this had been an \u201cerror\u201d).<\/p>\n The social networking behemoth acquired its messaging rival for $19BN in 2014<\/a>, and at the time told the EC it could not automatically match user accounts between\u00a0its own platform and WhatsApp \u2014 something the company subsequently revealed\u00a0itself doing.<\/p>\n (Although in Europe WhatsApp was quickly forced to suspend the data-sharing with Facebook<\/a>, under pressure from national data protection watchdogs. It\u2019s less clear whether it was required to delete any data already shared and account-links already forged.)<\/p>\n In the FAQ on verified business accounts, WhatsApp notes that users will be informed when they are talking to a business via \u201cyellow messages inside a chat\u201d.<\/p>\n While WhatsApp users who already have a business\u2019 phone number saved in their address book will see whatever name they have saved for that contact.<\/p>\n However when a business\u2019s phone number has not been saved in a user\u2019s address book the name they will see is the name the business has chosen for themselves \u2014 suggesting WhatsApp might be intending to allow verified businesses to \u2018cold-message\u2019 users, i.e. even if they have not had any prior contact with a business.<\/p>\n Alternatively, it could mean WhatsApp intends to offer users a business search function so they could manually browse and search to locate relevant business accounts at the point of need.<\/p>\n WhatsApp adds that users can stop a business from contacting them by using the standard block account process.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Featured Image: tanuha2001<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n Article source: http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/techcrunch\/social\/~3\/Vx6voPlAEiI\/<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Messaging giant WhatsApp is experimenting with giving businesses verified accounts on its platform. In an FAQ on its website the company notes that some business accounts will be displayed with <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[10,7,14,15,6,12,11],"class_list":["post-8744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-update","tag-computer-news","tag-downloads","tag-microsoft-download-news","tag-networking-updates","tag-technology-update","tag-wordpress-plugin-download","tag-wordpress-theme-download"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t