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| WhatsApp is suing the Indian government over traceability |
WhatsApp has taken legal action against the Indian government to challenge new regulations in the second largest internet market that could allow authorities to maintain the ability to track people's private information and conduct extensive surveillance.
As for the instant messaging services owned by Facebook, India is the largest market in India in terms of the number of users. The company filed a lawsuit in Delhi High Court on Wednesday.
She added that New Delhi's demand for traceability, which requires WhatsApp to assist New Delhi in identifying the author of a particular message, violates citizens' constitutional data protection rights.
In a statement, WhatsApp stressed that the requirement to track private messages would break complete encryption and lead to real abuse.
WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of individuals' personal information and continues to do its best under Indian law.
For the first time, India proposed changes to WhatsApp so that the originator of the message can be tracked in 2018.
This recommendation was made when WhatsApp was working to curb the spread of false information in India, as the spread of this information has claimed many lives.
However, the proposal did not go into effect until this year, and the traceability requirements are part of New Delhi's comprehensive IT regulations. The rule also requires social media companies to hire multiple workers in India to solve local problems and give authorities more powers to crack down on them. Entries are rejected.
The messaging platform, used by more than two billion people around the world, said in an article: Technology and privacy experts have discovered that traceability undermines end-to-end encryption and invades the privacy of billions of people who communicate digitally.
She added: Reasonable regulation is important to an increasingly digital world, but undermining individual privacy, violating human rights and violating the innocent is not the answer. WhatsApp is committed to doing everything it can to protect people's personal information. That is why we, together with others, reject traceability.
The Indian government has given large social media companies three months to comply with the new IT rules.
WhatsApp's new move is unusual as Facebook has been in close contact with New Delhi for many years as it fears it will damage its business in India, the world's second largest internet market.
As New Delhi tries to get Facebook to withdraw the new terms, WhatsApp is fighting a lawsuit by the Indian government over the new privacy policy.
Tensions between US tech giants and the Indian government have increased in recent months, as Twitter earlier this year refused to suspend accounts critical of New Delhi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Narendra Modi).
Last month, the Indian government ordered Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to remove posts critical of Modi's handling of the coronavirus pandemic.