Messaging platform WhatsApp has informed the Indian Supreme Court in Delhi that it will cease its operations in the country if it is forced to abandon message encryption due to the ongoing legal battle between the company and the Indian government, local media reported.
The platform notes that end-to-end encryption protects user privacy by allowing only the sender and recipient to access the message content.
“As a platform, we said that if we were asked to break the encryption, WhatsApp would be shut down,” said Tejas Karia, who represented WhatsApp in a New Delhi court.
Kariya added: "Such rules do not exist anywhere else in the world, not even in Brazil." We have to keep the entire chain and don't know which messages need to be decrypted. This means that millions of messages must be stored for years. He pointed out that people use WhatsApp because of the privacy features it provides.
WhatsApp responded to the Indian government, which asked the platform to track the content of chats and identify the creators of messages for security reasons, such as: b. To curb the spread of fake news, a strict stand has been taken against violation of message encryption under the Information Technology Rules Act. in India. The controversial 2021 law is accused of undermining... The country's right to privacy conflicts with the right to freedom of expression.
The platform stated that this weakens encryption and violates users' right to privacy under the Indian Constitution and that it would rather stop operations in India than break the encryption of messages.
More than 400 million users in India rely on WhatsApp, making it the platform's largest market worldwide.