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India Is Priority Market for Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram: Meta India Chief
Meta sees India as a “priority market” with “limitless” possibilities buoyed by macroeconomic growth, digital infrastructure and the popularity of its apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, the social media giant’s India head Sandhya Devanathan said.
In an interview with PTI, Devanathan, who took over the leadership role in January this year, said India’s new Digital Personal Data Protection legislation has provided a framework and clarity for tech companies and marks a “great step in balancing user protection with innovation”. Meta, she emphasised, “welcomes constructive regulations”, and will wait to see the detailed rules.
Devanathan, who is the Vice President of Meta in India, also spoke of the company’s determination to crack down on misinformation on the platform and outlined how it is harnessing AI (Artificial Intelligence) to pro-actively curb hateful content.
Meta will continue with its election integrity efforts, as India heads for Lok Sabha elections next year, she said.
India is among Meta’s largest user bases globally — 400 million users of Facebook were here at the last count and growing.
She said the user growth trajectory is strong. Overall, the possibilities offered by the Indian market are “limitless”, backed by strong macroeconomic fundamentals, Digital Public Infrastructure, and other factors.
For Meta, India is also one of the most engaged markets in short-form videos both in terms of creation and consumption of ‘Reels’, Devanathan said. “Meta India is innovating for Meta globally” and there is also a massive momentum in small businesses using Meta platforms and tools.
A significant number of businesses in India are on Meta, using its platforms to set up their first presence on the internet and to find and communicate with customers, she pointed out.
To a question on Facebook losing appeal among teens and young adult users across key markets, signalling a clear shift in preferences, Devanathan asserted that Facebook continues to see traction and relevance among users of all age groups.
Devanathan said she does not agree with the perception of a slow decline of Facebook with younger audiences.
“India is a huge priority market for the company. So, India has one of our largest user bases, be it on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. But equally, India is also the place where we test a lot of what we roll out globally as well. It has also been where we develop a lot of our innovative products and that investment will continue,” she said.
India’s vision of a $1 trillion (nearly Rs. 83,01,150 crore) digital economy by 2030 is a significant tailwind for opportunities, she noted.
“And that number is going to mean that tech companies will have tailwinds of a growing economy. Equally, you are looking at almost a billion people on the internet in not the very distant future, of which 400 million are expected to shop online…also look at the video consumption numbers…So there is this huge headroom not just for Meta, but for a whole lot of other companies as well,” she said.
Moreover, the advertising dollars as a percentage of GDP, is one of the lowest for India as compared to other markets. That number for the US is at about 1.9 percent with India at a sub 0.5 percent.
Meta sees India as a “huge priority market” to innovate, engage with users, and for business to grow.
Devanathan said Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram serve a wide spectrum of users.
“Facebook has actually a very thriving active community. So, I would debunk any myth…in terms of Facebook’s numbers… we just announced a few months ago that the daily activities on Facebook are growing, and just touched 2 billion and that’s a huge number of daily activities that we reported,” she said.
People use Facebook to come together and connect with friends, family, and community and that underlying appeal “hasn’t changed”.
“When you look at the 2 billion number…it is across-the-board. Facebook is very much a thriving platform across the world,” she said, emphasising that the slow decline of Facebook is not happening.
On the new regulatory framework emerging in India — the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, Digital India legislation in the offing, and existing social media rules — she said Meta welcomes “constructive” regulations.
“What DPDP has done is, it has provided a framework for tech companies to operate in and has provided clarity. We are waiting for the rules to get written out. But I would say that this is a great step in balancing user protection with innovations…because that is what will power India techade so we welcome constructive regulation and let’s see where we go from here,” she said.
India is one of the biggest markets for social media companies such as Meta, Google, and X (formerly Twitter), with its booming smartphone sales and availability of dirt cheap data supercharging growth for digital platforms.
That said, social media companies, over the past years, have drawn flak globally and in India over issues of user harm and the circulation of misinformation, hate speech, and fake news on their platforms. There is also a growing discontent among a section of users who allege that digital platforms have been indulging in arbitrary acts in taking down content, or not responding fast enough to grievances, despite users red-flagging them.
India has tightened rules for social media companies, increasing their accountability to users. In fact, the government has time and again emphasised that safety and trust are public policy objectives and mission, and it will do all it takes to ensure suitable safeguards are in place for digital citizens navigating online and social media space.
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YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.
Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.
“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.
Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour.
Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.
The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.
The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.
Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.
© 2023 Bloomberg LP
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WhatsApp has begun rolling out support for a new feature that will allow you to log in to your account using the biometric authentication mechanism on your smartphone. The messaging service will soon allow you to create a passkey — a kind of login credential that eliminates the need to use or remember a password — on your device and use it to securely log in to apps and services using the facial recognition or fingerprint scanner on your device.
Feature tracker WABetaInfo spotted the new passkey feature on WhatsApp beta for Android 2.23.20.4 on Tuesday, that is rolling out to beta users. However, not all users who have updated to the latest beta release will have access to the feature, which is reportedly rolling out to a “limited number of beta testers”. Gadgets 360 was unable to access the feature on two different Android smartphones that are both enrolled in the beta program.
The new Passkeys feature on WhatsApp
Photo Credit: WABetaInfo
The new passkey feature is described as a “simple way to sign in safely” to WhatsApp in a screenshot shared by the feature tracker. This suggests that it could be used to help sign in to other devices via secure authentication on your primary device.
Authenticating using passkeys isn’t a novel concept and the technology is slowly gaining traction online— Google already allows you to log in to a new device by using fingerprint-based biometric authentication for passkeys in place of a password. These passkeys are securely stored on your device and used when biometric authentication is provided.
The screenshot posted by WABetaInfo also states that WhatsApp will store the passkey in the device’s password manager — for most users, that would be the device’s default password store that is handled by Google with autofill support. The feature is also expected to make its way to iOS, where it is likely to be stored in the iOS Keychain.
It is currently unclear whether WhatsApp will also support storing passkeys in third-party apps like Bitwarden, 1Password, or Dashlane. We can expect to learn more about how the feature works when it is rolled out to more users in the beta program and the feature is expected to arrive on all smartphones on the stable channel in the future.
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Britain urged Meta not to roll out end-to-end encryption on Instagram and Facebook Messenger without safety measures to protect children from sexual abuse after the Online Safety Bill was passed by parliament.
Meta, which already encrypts messages on WhatsApp, plans to implement end-to-end encryption across Messenger and Instagram direct messages, saying the technology re-enforced safety and security.
Britain’s Home Secretary Suella Braverman said she supported strong encryption for online users but it could not come at the expense of children’s safety.
“Meta has failed to provide assurances that they will keep their platforms safe from sickening abusers,” she said. “They must develop appropriate safeguards to sit alongside their plans for end-to-end encryption.”
A Meta spokesperson said: “The overwhelming majority of Brits already rely on apps that use encryption to keep them safe from hackers, fraudsters and criminals.
“We don’t think people want us reading their private messages so have spent the last five years developing robust safety measures to prevent, detect and combat abuse while maintaining online security.”
It said it would update on Wednesday on the measures it was taking, such as restricting people over 19 from messaging teens who do not follow them and using technology to identify and take action against malicious behaviour.
“As we roll out end-to-end encryption, we expect to continue providing more reports to law enforcement than our peers due to our industry leading work on keeping people safe,” the spokesperson said.
Social media platforms will face tougher requirements to protect children from accessing harmful content when the Online Safety Bill passed by Parliament on Tuesday becomes law.
End-to-end encryption is a bone of contention between companies and the government in the new law.
Messaging platforms led by WhatsApp oppose a provision that they say could force them to break end-to-end encryption.
The government, however, has said the bill does not ban the technology, but instead, it requires companies to take action to stop child abuse and as a last resort develop technology to scan encrypted messages.
Tech companies have said scanning messages and end-to-end encryption are fundamentally incompatible.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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