WhatsApp has filed a petition against the Indian Government’s New Legislation that forces Facebook-owned Messaging platform to invade user data.
The law that is majorly talked about forces the social media companies to provide the government authorities with the identity of the “first originator of information”. WhatsApp questions this law as unconstitutional.
WhatsApp is attempting to block these laws from coming into effect. This one is considered as a beginning of a battle between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and tech Giants like Facebook, Alphabet and Twitter. This ‘Upon request’ will make no sense to the end to be encryption that these apps promises.
Even in April of 2021, the Indian government ordered Twitter to remove few posts that criticised its response towards this pandemic. Death tolls zoomed. Modi came under the bullet for holding large campaign rallies attended by thousands of people.
A few days earlier, police visited Twitter’s offices for requesting a response to their previous mails. The tension escalated when a. Content posted by government spokesperson as ” manipulated media”, which was described as forged content.
WhatsApp, which has half a billion users across India, is the major social media company affected by this law. WhatsApp alleges that it cannot one-sidedly comply with these laws to identify users who are deliberately spreading unlawful information as it would require eliminating the end-to-end encryption for the recipient as well, which can be dangerous for the users of the platform.
This is what WhatsApp’s statement denotes “Requiring messaging apps to ‘trace’ chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy.”
However, this argument was opposed by the Indian government by asking WhatsApp to find a way to track the source without breaking the encryption. WhatsApp has assured to continue working with the government on this matter.
WhatsApp is under constant threat regarding the privacy of its users. Many of them shifted to rivals platforms like signal and telegram earlier this year, when WhatsApp announced a new privacy update.
Signal and telegram have seen their Indian user base increase by a considerable amount, but it is a long way before they can reach WhatsApp like Numbers. Neither signal nor telegram has commented about this new legislation of the Indian government.
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