Under privacy control mode, gbwhatsapp allows blocking specific contacts, and its blacklist feature has been expanded to 5,000 (officially 1,000 for WhatsApp). Test data for 2025 show that the average blocking operation takes 1.2 seconds (official maximum of 0.8 seconds). But it achieves a false judgment rate of 0.8% (adding non-target numbers to the blacklist). In 2024, the Technical University of Berlin found that the vulnerability rate in which the users could be reached through the group @ function even after being blocked was 3.7% (0.1% for the official). A common instance was that an Indian e-commerce website exploited this flaw to deliver promotional messages, bypassing the blocking mechanism on average 127 times a day, causing user complaint rates to go up by 23%.
Security threat, according to the dimension of gbwhatsapp blacklist database saved in plain text in the/sdcard/gbwhatsapp/Blocklist folder, kaspersky lab data show that in 2025 malware copying the file success rate of 14% (only 0.3%) in the official app encrypted storage. Users’ social relationships can be directly identified by the hackers by scanning the blocked list. There were 23,000 targeted phishing in South Africa in 2024 and the average loss per attack is $48 per attack on the users. Also, its blocking feature depends on non-standard API interfaces (median response time is 1.8 seconds), and thus 7.3% of the blocking requests are hijacked and manipulated by man-in-the-middle, and the opportunity for the attackers to inject malicious numbers is 0.9 times per thousand operations.
Technically, gbwhatsapp’s “Enhanced Blocking” module supports regular expression blocking (e.g., * ads *). As of 2025 tests showed that it could potentially block 92.4% of spam (the official baseline keyword filtering effectiveness was 78%), but also caused a 14% false blocking ratio (e.g., normal messages with “promotions” getting blocked). When this feature is run by the Mediatek Dimensity 9300 processor, the memory usage is a peak of 217MB (official process is 89MB) and, upon continuous use for 2 hours, increases the temperature of the device to 45.6°C (official is 41.2°C). Market experience indicates that users lose clients on average 3.7 times per year due to unintentional blocking, and it takes an average of 18 minutes to unlock contacts (5 minutes for the official one).
Compliance audits further revealed that gbwhatsapp’s censored logs (timestamped and operation types done) infringed on the GDPR principle of limiting collection. A single transaction that involved illegal storage of 89,000 users’ data led to the European Union imposing a maximum fine of 120,000 euros in 2025. Device testing revealed that by enabling “deep shielding,” the energy efficiency of the Exynos 2200 chip declined by 19%, and daily average battery life reduced by 1.2 hours. The cost of the blocking API of the official WhatsApp Business is $0.0001 per occasion (success rate 99.9%), whereas the cost of blocking failure of gbwhatsapp due to protocol weakness is 7.3 times higher than that of the official. End-users pay an average of another $23 yearly for third-party blocking plugins (like ShieldPro).
Operation statistics report that gbwhatsapp users make use of the blocking function 4.3 times on average per day (1.2 times for formal users), while the accidental touch rate on the blacklist management interface is 11% (3% for formal users). Especially on screens that are 6.5 inches or less in size, clearing the accidental blocking entries takes 5.7 steps (3 steps for formal users). In 2024, Brazilian court cases indicated that 17% of harassment lawsuits were the result of the non-functioning of the whatsapp blocking feature. The court ordered the developers to compensate the users up to $5,400 per transaction. Technical log shows that in synchronization of the blocking list between devices, the probability of data overwrite conflicts is 9.3% (0.4% for official end-to-end encrypted synchronization), which forces users to manually repair the blacklist on average 3.2 times per year, with a total time cost equalling 14 US dollars per year.