Govt Gives Ultimatum To Meta India To Enforce WhatsApp Traceability

When Meta policy chief Nick Clegg visited India last month, the government had reportedly given an ultimatum to the social media giant to enforce traceability of WhatsApp messages. He was told that the government would enforce the traceability clause on WhatsApp irrespective of the courts’ interventions.

According to a Moneycontrol report, a senior official told Clegg that Meta can make suggestions on the language of the traceability provision. Yet, since the draft Digital India Act could be out before Christmas, the government wants to press the obligation of traceability.

It is notable that Meta’s WhatsApp has been opposing the traceability clause since the first time the IT Rules came into force. With that, WhatsApp and Facebook started a legal battle with the government and cried foul over the clause and invasion of people’s privacy.

Clegg had previously also told the government to use Meta’s metadata and machine intelligence to identify the sources of messages. The mechanism would also offer basic details such as call duration, among others to ‘lawfully’ identify the ‘originators’. 

The company further has argued that the decryption and ‘originator of the message’ clause have a loophole as anyone can just share a screenshot of the chat and not a text, making it impossible to know the ‘originator’.

The policy chief also offered to harness WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook linkages to help law enforcement agencies. But according to the latest developments, the government believes that the traceability provision was an important one to handle law enforcement such as terrorism cases.

Notably, Meta is wary of the traceability provision and put its foot down and decided not to touch its encryption tech. The matter was also being heard in the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court, but WhatsApp has always maintained that the action would end up hampering its users’ right to privacy. 

Interestingly, it is not just Meta that looks down on the encryption-breaking clause. A recent report on IT Rules by the industry bodies IAMAI and The Dialogue – that took responses from 70 stakeholders – stated with a general consensus that it was impossible to implement traceability without breaking the encryption tech.  The government, on the other hand, has reportedly talked about an alphanumeric hash tech that can enable traceability as well as keep messages encrypted.

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