The gb whatsapp’s call blocking can block voice calls and video calls from blacklisted numbers, according to a Truecaller report dated 2023 by the communications security agency Truecaller. It has an in-house database of harassing numbers of over 250 million records (refreshed every three days). The interception success rate achieved was 98.6% (89% for the official WhatsApp). For example, practice with Indian users shows that when this feature is enabled, the amount of harassing calls received daily was decreased from 11.3 to 0.4 (down 96.5%), while the chance of intercepting lawful numbers accidentally was 2.1% (e.g., short numbers of bank customer care). Technically, gb whatsapp reduced response latency for interception down to 0.2 seconds (0.5 seconds in the official release) by modulating the handling logic for incoming calls within Android Telecom’s call handling code base, but increasing application memory by 18% (to as high as 420MB) in the process.
Legally, the Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive within the EU requires interception capability to be notified explicitly to users and kept in a record. But gb whatsapp’s “stealth interception” mode (silent rejection without warning) was deemed illegal by the French Data Protection Agency (CNIL) in March 2024, which led it to lose 14% of its European users. For instance, Deutsche Telekom was penalized 240,000 euros for employees using gb whatsapp to intercept customer complaint calls, including 12,000 records of illegal interception. Besides, the maximum capacity of this function’s blacklist is 5,000 numbers (only 1,000 for the official version), and they are stored in an unencrypted SQLite database (location: / data/data/com. Gbwhatsapp/blocked_calls db), Brazilian police in September 2023 have extortion case, criminal victims by the reverse target database pulled out, a success rate of 37%.
In terms of technical requirements, gb whatsapp’s “Intelligent Interception” function adopts a machine learning paradigm (TensorFlow Lite-based), which can identify the calling habit of risky numbers (e.g., repeated short and long calls), with accuracy 93.5% (test dataset: 100,000 samples). When run on the Redmi Note 12 Pro, the CPU load is boosted to 32% (baseline value 19%), and an additional 4.7% of power are utilized per hour (the lifespan of the 4000mAh battery is reduced by approximately 1.8 hours). User study shows that 68% of users aged between 18 and 35 years use the blocking feature more than five times a day, and the users who are older than 56 have as much as 29% misoperation rate (i.e., accidentally blacklisting a correct number).
At the protocol level of the network, gb whatsapp does call interception through forging SIP protocol response codes (like 603 Decline), but does not adhere to the IETF RFC 3261 standard, thus creating compatibility problems with VoLTE networks of certain operators. In January 2024, MTN, a South African telecommunication firm, performed tests and determined the possibility of base station signaling errors due to gb whatsapp interception ability within its network was 7.3%, 4.8 times the official app. If the user enables “deep blocking” (blocking unknowns at the same time), the metadata of call records (for example, call time and call duration) will still be preserved (stored into call_logs.xml) and the threat of leakage of privacy is 14% higher than in the mode of full deleting.
User satisfaction rate from market feedback shows that in areas with a high rate of harassing calls such as Nigeria and Pakistan, the blocking feature of gb whatsapp has an 82% satisfaction rate. However, the complexity of its custom rule Settings (such as blocking by area code) has caused 23% of users to drop it. Market research firm Omdia suggests that the use of a third-party firewall (such as NetGuard) can reduce the rate of false interception to 0.9%, but will increase APK size by another 13MB and decrease call connection speed by 0.7 seconds. As of May 2024, approximately 41 million users worldwide rely on gb whatsapp’s blocking feature. But its technical weaknesses and legal threats remain to be weighed by ongoing updates (on average every 45 days, with patches released) and localized compliance adaptation.