WhatsApp In Hot Soup As CCI To Act Against Its Privacy Policy Update

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) is likely to issue an order to Meta-owned instant messaging app WhatsApp for allegedly breaching the country’s competition laws.

As per Livemint, citing sources close to the matter, a contentious update on WhatsApp privacy policy and service terms has attracted the wrath from the CCI and the order from the watchdog for fairness in trade practices may include a penalty, too.

The report further said that the messaging giant’s controversial 2021 update would allow WhatsApp to share certain user data with Meta.

The sources also confirmed that the director general of investigation of CCI has concluded that WhatsApp and Meta contravened the provisions of competition law that prohibit abuse of dominance.

As per the Competition Act revision in 2023, the regulatory watchdog is allowed to levy penalties of up to 10% of the average turnover for the preceding three financial years on guilty enterprises.

This comes just over a month after WhatsApp started rolling out the Meta Verified badge feature for all eligible small businesses in India, which will allow them to send personalised messages to customers.

Earlier in June, Meta said that it would roll out the Meta Verified programme for WhatsApp business users in India. Later, the social media giant also launched the Verified service for brands on Facebook and Instagram.

In April, WhatsApp told the Delhi High Court that it would end its India operations if the platform was forced to break its message encryption.

Following that, I&B Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw confirmed to the Rajya Sabha that WhatsApp and its parent company Meta have not informed the government of any plans to shut down their services in India.

It is important to note global tech giants such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft have been under regulatory scrutiny in various cases across India.

From January to June last year, Indian authorities issued a total of 70,612 content take-down requests across all Meta platforms. Of these, 63,586 were legal process requests, while the remaining were classified as ‘emergency disclosure requests’.

With rising digitisation, India has emerged as an important market for big tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, among others. Last year, Meta also joined hands with ONDC to bring small businesses on the network.