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WhatsApp messaging service is suing the Indian government in Delhi High Court, questioning new rules that will force it to break its encryption, revealing the identities of the people who sent and received billions of messages on its platform. Reuters was first reported the lawsuit, a WhatsApp spokesman confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that the requirement to“ trace ”private messages would break the final encryption and lead to real abuses,” a WhatsApp spokesman told BuzzFeed News. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and to this end we will continue to do everything we can within the laws of India.”
A spokesman for India’s IT ministry did not return a request for comment by the time this story was published.
More than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, are from India.
Since 2016, messages and files sent via WhatsApp have been encrypted, which means that no one except the sender and recipient can view their content. WhatsApp has long said that it is important for people’s privacy. But governments around the world, among others USA, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan Apps like WhatsApp have been pushing to break that encryption, saying it could be a challenge to enforce the law to be able to track who sent it. Like digital rights organizations Log in now, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mozilla they support the fight to keep WhatsApp’s end encryption.
India was recently established IT standards they require messaging platforms like WhatsApp to provide a way to track the identity of the sender of any message. The new rules are in effect today.
In one blog post WhatsApp said on its official website published late on Tuesday that “[a] the government that chooses to promise traceability effectively promises a new way of mass surveillance. “
He also said that traceability would violate human rights. “Innocent people could be caught in investigations or go to jail for sharing content that later becomes a problem in front of a government even if it doesn’t hurt to share it in the first place,” the WhatsApp message said. “Any threat that someone writes takes away people’s privacy and would have a tremendous impact on what people say even in private environments, violating the general principles of free expression and human rights.”
India is a huge and important market for the global technology giants. But in recent times, these companies have been under increasing pressure from an increasingly authoritarian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier this week, police in Delhi visit Twitter offices said members of the ruling party after the platform were “manipulated media”.
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