(UPDATE) Mobile wallet GCash has updated its display feature to hide the first name of recipients for its send money feature as spam messages flood inboxes of Filipinos.
A quick check on the app shows that GCash has omitted some letters from the recipient's name, making it harder to guess.
ALSO READ: Text Spammers Know Your App Usernames, What's Going On?
Mark Anthony Amurao, advocacy lawyer for GCash, confirmed in a Senate panel inquiry that the app had implemented such update to appease Filipinos who fear that they personal information were being accessed.
"We'd like to maintain our position that we have not violated any law or regulation when we provided initially name of our customers," Amurao said.
"We changed it because since we continuously reassess our processes, even if there were no violations, it's only for the purpose of allaying the fears of our citizens that their names will no longer be scraped or harvested," he added.
The updated display feature is just in an "experimental phase" for now, Amurao said.
"We won't know if it will be as effective as the purpose for which we showed the names of the recipients is to prevent fraud and to prevent inadvertent sending to the wrong persons," he added.
The mobile wallet with some 60 million users earlier said it was preparing to shift some transaction notifications to the app inbox from SMS.
The National Privacy Commission has advised the public to ignore, block, and report spam messages to authorities.
Recipients of spam messages are encouraged to report these incidents through the NPC email, [email protected], or through its social media pages.
ALSO READ: GCash is Changing Your Notifications to Fight Spam Texts
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