In an interesting turn of events, Facebook-owned Whatsapp has filed a legal in Delhi High Court complaint against the Indian government’s new media regulations, which compels Facebook to break privacy protocols, or as reported by Reuters, “the new media regulations mean an end to privacy.”
Reuters reports that the lawsuit filed by the American messaging company asks Delhi High Court to declare new rules as a violation of privacy rights according to India’s constitution since it’s asking social media companies to identify the ‘first originator of the information.’ However, the new rules only require social media companies to share information of accused of any misconduct. Still, Whatsapp won’t be able to do that for a single user, as conversations are end to end encrypted. So, even for the needed information from authorities, Whatsapp would have to break the encryption for ‘originator’ as well as ‘receivers’.
“It would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy. We have consistently joined civil society and experts around the world in opposing requirements that would violate the privacy of our users,” said a Whatsapp spokesperson said to The Tribune.
This move comes amidst the growing tension between the central government and tech giants in India, where the ‘system’ is trying to control social media. Earlier this week, the Delhi police raided the Twitter Gurugram office in connection with BJP’s Sambit Patra’s “Manipulated Media” tweet. To recall, the microblogging platform labelled Patra’s ‘toolkit’ tweet as ‘Manipulated Media’.
As of now, there no comments from either Whatsapp or Central Government about the lawsuit. A Whatsapp spokesperson refused to comment on the matter.
Source: Reuters