WhatsApp Threatens To Leave India If Forced To Break Message Encryption

Continuing its legal tussle with the Indian government, Meta-owned messaging platform WhatsApp told the Delhi High Court that it would end its India operations if the platform was forced to break its message encryption.

WhatsApp counsel made the assertion during a hearing on the platform’s plea challenging a provision of IT Rules, 2021 for social media intermediaries, which require them to identify the first originator of information to a court or other competent authority.

“As a platform, we are saying if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” its counsel Tejas Karia reportedly said. 

He said that WhatsApp users use the messaging platform because of the privacy it assures and for the end-to-end encryption offering.

The tech giant said that tracing users’ messages undermines the encryption of content and the privacy of the users. It also violates the fundamental rights of the users guaranteed under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Indian constitution, the counsel argued. 

“There is no such rule anywhere else in the world. Not even in Brazil,” Karia was quoted as saying in various news reports.

“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,” he said. 

However, the IT ministry continues to seek the ability to trace messages on these intermediary platforms. 

Appearing for the central government, counsel Kirtiman Singh said that the idea behind the guidelines was to trace the originator of the messages. 

He emphasised that tracing the messages is the need of the hour and argued that WhatsApp has already faced difficult questions related to this before the US Congress.

Meanwhile, the HC said, “…privacy rights were not absolute” and “somewhere balance has to be done.” 

The HC scheduled the next hearing in the case on August 14.

The Centre, as part of its bid to better regulate the internet, has amended the IT Rules multiple times since they came into force.

It is pertinent to note that big tech giants like Meta, Google and Microsoft are under regulatory scrutiny in multiple cases in India. Between January and June last year, Indian authorities issued a total of 70,612 content take-down requests across all Meta platforms, of which 63,586 were legal process requests and the rest were ‘emergency disclosure requests’. 

Earlier this month, social media giant X said it withheld some political posts in the country on the orders of the Election Commission of India (ECI) but expressed its disagreement with the takedown orders and called on the poll body to publish all such orders going forward.