Messaging service WhatsApp is suing the Indian government in the Delhi Supreme Court, challenging new rules that would force them to break their encryption and potentially revealing the identities of people who have sent and received billions of messages on their platform . Reuters first reported on the lawsuit, which a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
“Civil society and technical experts around the world have argued time and time again that the requirement to track private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do everything we can under Indian law to do so.”
A spokesman for India’s IT ministry did not return a request for comment at the time this story was published.
More than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, are from India.
Since 2016, messages and files sent via WhatsApp have been encrypted so that only the sender and recipient can see their content. WhatsApp has long said this is important for people’s privacy. But governments around the world including the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan have pressured apps like WhatsApp to break that encryption, stating that they cannot keep track of who sent what, which is a challenge for them represents law enforcement. Digital rights organizations like Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mozilla have supported WhatsApp’s battle for end-to-end encryption.
India’s recently enacted IT rules require messaging platforms like WhatsApp to trace content back to senders. They also give the Indian government the power to ask platforms that remove content that violates “decency or morals” and threatens “national security” and “public order”. If companies do not comply with the new rules, their employees can be prosecuted.
In a blog post on its official website posted late Tuesday, WhatsApp said: “[a] A government mandating traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance. “
It was also said that traceability would violate human rights. “Innocent people could get involved in an investigation or even go to jail to share content that later becomes a problem in the eyes of a government, even if it does no harm, if it is shared at all,” the WhatsApp post read . “The threat that everything someone writes can be traced back to them robs people of privacy and, even in private settings, would have a terrifying effect on what people say, against generally accepted principles of freedom of expression and the Violates human rights. “
India is a large and important market for global technology giants. More recently, however, these companies have come under pressure from an increasingly authoritarian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier this week, Delhi police visited Twitter’s offices after the platform labeled some tweets from members of the ruling party as “manipulated media”.
Comments are closed.