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Whatsapp Sues Indian Government Over Privacy Issues

WhatsApp is the first large tech player to mount a legal challenge against the government, in addition to multiple small players who had raised an objection previously. This case has the potential to be the biggest privacy case in India since the 2017 right to privacy judgment.

Facebook-owned company WhatsApp is suing the Government of India at the Delhi High Court over the new social media rules which can potentially force the platform to break its end-to-end encryption security, making personal messaging on the platform more vulnerable to leakage. The company confirmed the lawsuit on May 25.

Some of the key requirements laid down for messaging platforms include identifying the first generator of the information, what we colloquially call ‘traceability’. WhatsApp is the first large tech player to mount a legal challenge against the government, in addition to multiple small players who had raised an objection previously. This case has the potential to be the biggest privacy case in India since the 2017 right to privacy judgment. The same judgment will be invoked by WhatsApp, challenging the ‘traceability’ clause.

The social media rules, or what we call Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, formally require providing messaging services to “enable the identification of the first originator of the information” by “significant social media intermediary”. In this case, the intermediary is a messaging platform that has more than a million registered users in India. This provision will significantly impact the end-to-end encryption present in WhatsApp and other platforms like Signal.

The lawsuit comes at a time when WhatsApp has already gathered flak for collaborating with Facebook and becoming infamous for integrating with Facebook.  After some back and forth, the government of India directed the platform to withdraw its privacy policy. Whatsapp in turn assured the government that it will not force Indian users to accept the new privacy policy, at least until the Personal Data Protection law is implemented.

In a blog post that went live after Whatsapp’s legal challenge, the platform said, “a government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.” This implies that private companies will have to collect and store data from the message-based correspondence every day, irrespective of user consent. 



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