WhatsApp warns to cease operation in India over breaching privacy rules

NEW DELHI: Meta’s WhatsApp has warned that it will cease its operations in India if it is compelled to breach message encryption.

The company, owned by Meta, asserted that end-to-end encryption is crucial for safeguarding user privacy, ensuring that only the sender and recipient can access message content.

“We, as a platform, are stating that WhatsApp must go if we are instructed to crack encryption,” Tejas Karia, representing the company, stated before a Division Bench, according to the Times of India. According to Karia, WhatsApp’s privacy features are the main reason users utilize it. India is the platform’s largest market, with over 400 million users of WhatsApp.

The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021, which mandate that WhatsApp and Facebook’s parent corporation Meta track conversations and identify message originators, are being contested by the two companies. The firms contend that the regulation infringes on user privacy rights guaranteed by the Indian Constitution and impairs encryption.

The messaging platform contended that the regulations jeopardize user privacy and content encryption. Additionally, it infringes against the users’ fundamental rights as stated in Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Indian Constitution.

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Reportedly, Karia said, “There is no such rule anywhere else in the world. Not even in Brazil. We will have to keep a complete chain and we don’t know which messages will be asked to be decrypted. It means millions and millions of messages will have to be stored for a number of years.”

On behalf of the central government, Kirtiman Singh supported the restrictions, highlighting the necessity of tracing the originators of messages. Such a process, according to Singh, is necessary in the current climate.

On August 14, the Delhi High Court scheduled a hearing for the applications filed by WhatsApp and Meta. The bench stated that striking a “somewhere balance has to be done” because privacy rights were not unqualified.