Spam text messaging has become increasingly common in recent years. According to a survey by Cloudmark, 72 percent of U.S. adults have received an unsolicited text message with commercial intent. It’s frustrating when these spam text messages flood your smartphone. Even if you don’t buy the advertised product or service, they still capture your attention and distract you from your normal daily activities. Thankfully, however, Google is taking action to help Android users fight spam text messages.
As reported by NDTV, Google has updated its Messages app for Android with a new spam-fighting feature. Found in the Settings menu of Android, it allows Android users to block incoming messages from spammers as well as report spammers to Google.
After enabling the feature on your Android-powered smartphone or device, you can tap text spam messages in your Messages app to mark them as spam. This will automatically send up to 10 of the last text messages you’ve received from that number to Google. The search engine company will then analyze these messages to determine if they are truly spam. In addition to reporting spam text messages to Google, you can also block future text messages from a spammer’s number.
Gizmodo reveals that some Android users may be hesitant to enable the new spam-fighting feature on their Android device because of privacy concerns. However, Google says that the actual content of a reported text message is concealed. When a user reports a text message as spam, it only sends basic data, such as the sender’s phone number, to Google.
Android’s new spam-fighting feature couldn’t come at a better time. While spam text messages have been used for decades, mobile device users have reported an increasingly number of them in the past few years. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has responded to these reports by reiterating the fact that unsolicited text messages sent from an auto-dialer are illegal, but that hasn’t dissuaded from spammers from using them.
Not all Android users have access to Android’s new spam-fighting feature. Google is still in the early stages of rolling it out, so some users will have to wait. With spam text messaging becoming such a widespread problem, though, it’s only a matter of time until all Android users are able to block and report spam messages to Google.
