“Will Shut Down” WhatsApp Threatens To Exit India (image-pixabay)WhatsApp has told the Delhi Court that if forced to break message encryption, the messaging platform will effectively shut down in India. They further added that end-to-end encryption protects user privacy by ensuring only the sender and recipient can access message content.
“As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” Tejas Karia, appearing for WhatsApp, told a Division bench.
The Delhi High Court listed the petition by WhatsApp and Meta for hearing on August 14. The bench said that privacy rights were not absolute and “somewhere balance has to be done”.
She further added that people use WhatsApp because of its privacy features. With more than 400 million users, the meta-owned company has the largest platform in the country.
“India is a country that’s at the forefront… you are leading the world in terms of how people and business have embraced messaging,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerburg had said in a virtual address at Meta’s annual event last year.
The company argues that the existing law will weaken the encryption and violate the user’s privacy protections under the Indian Constitution. As per the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rule 2021, it can trace chats and identify message originators.
The company argues that it violates the fundamental rights of the users guaranteed under Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution of India.
“This is no such rule anywhere else in the world. Not even in Brazil. We will have to keep a complete chain and we don’t know messages will be asked to be encrypted. It means millions and millions of messages will have to be stored for a number of years”, Karia said.
Meanwhile, Kritiman Singh who appeared for the central government argued that it’s necessary to trace message originators as it’s essential in the present scenario.