WhatsApp Privacy Policy: Delhi HC Dismisses Plea To Stop CCI Probe

The Delhi High Court has dismissed the pleas filed by WhatsApp and its parent Facebook (now Meta) that challenged the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) probe against the messaging app’s updated privacy policy in 2021.

A division bench comprising Chief Justice Satish Chandra Shama and Justice Subramonium Prasad dismissed it by saying that the appeals were devoid of merit.

This comes just after a month when during a court hearing session, CCI had said that its probe should be allowed to continue due to the controversial privacy policy update being ‘still in place and functional’.

Following the latest order, CCI is now given the jurisdiction to proceed with the probe.

In January last year, WhatsApp introduced a new privacy policy that stated that the messaging app would share more of its user data with its parent company Meta including transaction data, IP addresses, mobile device information, and other non-personally identifiable information.

More importantly, WhatsApp stated that non-acceptance of its updated policy would eventually lead to the users’ losing access to their accounts.

Following that, WhatsApp and Meta came under CCI’s lens and on March 24 last year, the antitrust watchdog ordered an investigation into the messaging app’s privacy policy update for its conduct that was prima facie ‘exclusionary’ and ‘exploitative’.

However, the tech giants challenged such a probe but a single judge bench of Justice Navin Chawla had then rejected the plea.

On the social media giants’ request to the court to relook into the matter a division bench was formed.

Meanwhile, during the course of the previous hearing sessions, WhatsApp said that it would not enforce its privacy policy as mandatory till Parliament passes the Data Protection Bill as law.

Harish Salve, representing WhatsApp, had assured the Court that the messaging platform will conform to the parliamentary law. Salve had also said that the investigation taken up by CCI was just a “headline-grabbing endeavour”.

CCI’s concern has been around WhatsApp collecting excessive data and stalking its users, which would also adversely affect competition in the country. Besides, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) also filed an affidavit in the Delhi High Court in April 2021 stressing that WhatsApp’s privacy policy violated the Information Technology Rules (IT Rules), 2011 on five counts.

While the CCI probe into the matter got reinvigorated, it is pertinent to note that in this one year, significant changes have taken place in the privacy and data security landscape in India. Recently, the Indian government withdrew the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2021, which had given a major direction to the entire controversy of data collection by Meta and its subsidiary WhatsApp.

India continues to be devoid of any concrete data protection law while the draft that legal experts and companies were referring to so far has also been withdrawn. Hence, India is currently left with a few landmark court hearings to decide on data privacy.

On the other hand, the tech giants continue to witness the regulatory heat in India. Executives of Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, and others appeared before a parliamentary panel this week where there have been discussions about preparing a legal framework to curb the anti-competitive practices of those players.