In December our mobile phone and our WhatsApp group are filled with congratulations, memes, funny videos, nonsense that all our friends and family send and forward continuously because they are fun and we want to share them with everyone. But be careful, you run many risks by sending and forwarding anything that is sent to you.
You should note that there are many messages that we receive that have the inscription, in the messaging app, of “resent many times”. WhatsApp thus intends to notify us if the file or photo we have received is of the chain type that thousands of people have shared before and that has gone from mobile to mobile, spreading any type of information.
Hazards and risks
There are several dangers you will face if you forward or save forwarded files.
Viruses and malware
It seems impossible for many people, but yes, there can be malware in a WhatsApp video. How easily these are forwarded and spread is an advantage for any malware to easily spread to thousands of phones without causing suspicion. They are the perfect hiding place. They are forwarded over and over again from group to group and from chat to chat.
It may seem absurd to you, but there are many viruses that have spread through WhatsApp, such as Pegasus itself, a malware that had affected all kinds of politicians and Jeff Bezos himself through an MP4 video file sent in a conversation on the Internet. app.
Accumulation of junk on the phone
Every thing that you send or is sent to you by WhatsApp is normally saved in the phone’s gallery . And you keep accumulating all kinds of files that are junk and you don’t want at all. Memes you received in 2010 and are still there, year after year, Christmas after Christmas. This causes your phone to go much slower, you don’t have space for application updates or the performance is much better.
In addition, as we have already explained before, some of these videos or photos may be infected with malware, so the mobile will go even worse and it will not only affect the accumulation.
Spam report
WhatsApp controls that we do not continuously forward junk through the messaging application and may ban us for spam. We read it in the WhatsApp manual of recommended behaviors through the FAQ section of the application: “Think twice before forwarding messages: We create a label for forwarded messages and limit the number of times you can forward messages so that users think well before sharing something. If you are not sure that something is true or you do not know the person who wrote the message, we recommend that you do not forward it”
In addition, practices that should be avoided also include “automatic or mass messages”: “WhatsApp uses machine learning technology and user reports to detect and suspend accounts that send unwanted automatic messages.” We must avoid this , then, if we want to avoid WhatsApp banning us for being too heavy by continuously forwarding automatic messages.
How to configure our mobile phone
The best thing you can do is configure the mobile phone so that files are not downloaded by themselves. We can configure WhatsApp to automatically prevent the videos or photos that are forwarded to us from being saved on our device and only we choose what we download or not, taking into account who sends it or seeing the thumbnail of the app to see if it is reliable.
We can block downloads to prevent this:
- We open WhatsApp
- We touch on the three points in the upper right corner
- Open the settings section
- Go to the “storage and data” section
- Look for the “automatic download” option
- You will see three options
- Download with mobile data
- Download with Wi-Fi
- in data roaming
- Tap on the different options and choose “No file”
So you will be the one who decides what is downloaded and what is not.
