WhatsApp warns ceasing operations in India over privacy rules

Meta’s WhatsApp has warned that it will cease its operations in India owing to the introduction of new rules and regulations.

During a hearing at the Delhi High Court, the messaging platform said that WhatsApp services will be effectively shut down in India if it is forced to break message encryption, an Indian media outlet reported.

“As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” the company’s lawyer Tejas Karia told a Division Bench.

WhatsApp argued that the end-to-end encryption of the messaging platform gives protection to users’ privacy as only the sender and recipient can access message content.

The lawyer maintained WhatsApp is widely used for interaction due to the privacy features it offers.

Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp and Facebook, challenged India’s Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules 2021.

The rules require them to trace chats and identify message originators which the company said would weaken encryption and violate user privacy protections under the Indian Constitution.

“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,” Karia said.

While highlighting that the rules undermined encryption of content and users’ privacy, WhatsApp argued that the move violated fundamental rights of the users protected under the Constitution of India.

Meanwhile, the Indian government’s lawyer defended the rules, saying that there was a need to trace the originators of messages.

He emphasised the importance of such a mechanism in the current times.

The court said that privacy rights were not absolute and “somewhere balance has to be done,” as the petitions were set for hearing on August 14.

It is pertinent to mention that India is the largest market for WhatsApp as it has more than 400 million users in the country.

“India (is) a country that’s at the forefront… You’re leading the world in terms of how people and businesses have embraced messaging,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had said in a virtual address at Meta’s annual event last year.