In 2020, WhatsApp emerged as the top app in India as users spent most of their time on it. In many cases, it’s the first app that an Indian smartphone user downloads. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, and the service has become a primary means of communication there. In the meantime, we will also continue to engage with the government of India on practical solutions aimed at keeping people safe, including responding to valid legal requests for the information available to us.” “We have consistently joined civil society and experts around the world in opposing requirements that would violate the privacy of our users. “Requiring messaging apps to ‘trace’ chats is the equivalent of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every single message sent on WhatsApp, which would break end-to-end encryption and fundamentally undermines people’s right to privacy,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told WIRED via email. But this is the first time the traceability requirement has been officially imposed, and in the platform’s biggest market.
Other countries, including the US, Canada, and the UK have also pressured WhatsApp to weaken its encryption. The platform is facing a similar call from Brazil, its second-largest market after India. This isn’t the first time such a demand has been made of WhatsApp. Traceability and end-to-end encryption cannot coexist. Complying with these rules would endanger the fundamental right to privacy, experts say, because undermining encryption for one would mean doing so for all. While it is difficult to assess the possible outcomes of the lawsuit, it could potentially dictate the kind of communications technology and online safe spaces available to Indians going forward, and could set a precedent for what other governments would demand from not just WhatsApp but other secure messaging apps. Doing so could require WhatsApp to weaken its end-to-end encryption, revealing the identities of senders and affecting the security of its 400 million-plus users in India-and possibly billions of others worldwide. This week, the Facebook-owned messaging platform sued the Indian government in a bid to challenge new IT rules that ask messaging apps to trace the “first originator” of a message.
WhatsApp is fighting for the privacy of citizens of the world’s largest democracy.
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