The popular messaging app WhatsApp has filed a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Delhi High Court over new rules that force the service to scrap its users' privacy. The lawsuit was first reported by Reuters and a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
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“Civil society and technical experts around the world have argued that requiring ‘tracking’ private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. “WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s private messages, and we will continue to do everything we can under Indian law to do so.”
India's IT ministry did not comment on the case.
More than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, are from India.
Since 2016, messages and files sent via WhatsApp have been encrypted, meaning that no one but the sender and recipient can see their contents. WhatsApp has long said this is important for people’s privacy. But governments around the world, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan, have been pressuring apps like WhatsApp to break this encryption, saying that not being able to track who sent what presents a challenge to law enforcement. Digital rights groups such as Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Mozilla have supported WhatsApp’s fight to maintain end-to-end encryption.
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New IT rules enacted in India require messaging platforms like WhatsApp to provide a way to trace the identity of the sender of any message. The new rules come into effect today.
In a post on its official website late Tuesday, WhatsApp said that “the government choosing to mandate traceability is essentially promoting a new form of mass surveillance.”
It also said that traceability violates human rights. “Innocent people could be caught up in investigations or even go to jail for sharing content that later becomes a problem in the eyes of a government, even if they meant no harm by sharing it,” WhatsApp’s post said. “The threat that anything someone writes can be traced takes away people’s privacy and would have a major impact on what people say even in private settings, violating universally recognized principles of free expression and human rights.”
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India is a large and important market for global tech giants. But in recent years, those companies have faced pressure from an increasingly authoritarian government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Earlier this week, police in Delhi visited Twitter's offices after the platform described some tweets from members of the ruling party as "manipulative."
