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WhatsApp is struggling for the privacy of the world’s largest democratic citizens. This week, Facebook-owned messaging platform he sued the Indian government for questioning the new IT rules that require messaging applications to trace the “first creator” of a message. Doing so may make WhatsApp weaken end-to-end encryption, revealing the identities of the sender and could affect the security of more than 400 million users in India, as well as billions of other people worldwide.
While it is difficult to assess the possible outcome of the lawsuit, it could dictate what communication technology and secure networking space would look like for Indians going forward, and could set a precedent for what other governments would ask for besides WhatsApp. secure messaging applications It would be to comply with these rules endangering the person’s basic right to privacy, experts say, weakening encryption for one would mean doing it for everyone. Traceability and end-to-end encryption cannot live together.
Indian Internet regulations approved a rule through social networking platforms, messaging applications, online media and streaming video services executive order in February. The platforms were given three months to complete, and the period ended earlier in the week. One of the new directives requires messaging platforms in the country with more than five million users – including not only WhatsApp, but also Signal – to enable the primary source of information to be identified if required by a court or government order. In terms of content that has started outside the country, these services need to identify the first instance in India.
At the moment, end-to-end encrypted platform providers like WhatsApp and Signal can’t see what messages they have, which can’t keep track of specific content. Having to keep track of messages in addition to treating each individual as a potential criminal would be a heavy task for the company to store large amounts of data.
“Traceability will force end-to-end encrypted platforms to change their architecture in a way that will negatively affect online privacy and security. . “It’s a tedious task that seriously undermines extreme encryption and jeopardizes users’ privacy, security, and freedom of expression.”
Government of India he says that its intent is not to violate anyone’s privacy, and that the tracing shall be used only for the prevention, investigation, or punishment of very serious crimes related to Indian sovereignty and integrity, state security, friendship with foreign states, or a related crime or rape, sex to encourage a crime related to explicit material or material sexual abuse of children. “
But these definitions leave plenty of room for interpretation. The government can trace someone who is providing dangerous misinformation, but can just as easily use that power to see how political content flows between different individuals or to monitor activists and political opponents.
“The moment you build a system that unmasks some people and sends some content to people, you build a system that can unmask anyone who sends any content,” says Matthew Green, a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins University. “There is no gathering information for the wicked. It is very dangerous to start showing this information because you do not know where it will end. ”
This is not the first time that WhatsApp has made such a request. The platform is making a similar call from Brazil, India’s second largest market. Others countries, Including the US, Canada and the UK He pressed WhatsApp to weaken the encryption. But this is the first time the traceability requirement has been officially established, and in the largest market on the platform.
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