WhatsApp has informed the Delhi High Court that it will cease operations in India if it is forced to compromise on messaging encryption during WhatsApp LLC’s ongoing case against the Union of India. The online messaging platform claims that end-to-end encryption preserves user privacy by allowing only the sender and recipient to access the message content.
Tejas Karia, appearing on WhatsApp, told a Division Bench in New Delhi:
“As a platform, we say, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes.
There is no such rule anywhere else in the world, not even in Brazil. We will have to maintain a complete chain and we do not know which messages will be asked to decode. This means that millions and millions of messages will have to be kept for several years.”
Kariya added that people use WhatsApp for the privacy feature it offers, and the service has more than 400 million users in India, making the country also the biggest market for the platform.
The Meta-owned company is challenging the 2021 IT rules in India (PDF, via LiveLaw.in), which require monitoring chats and identifying the origin of messages for security reasons, such as curbing the spread of fake news. WhatsApp says this weakens encryption and violates users’ privacy rights under the Indian constitution.
Since then, there is also WhatsApp Post an explanation which highlights how the requirement to monitor messages, without specifically naming the Indian government, violates human rights.
God IT Rules, 2021 were introduced by the central government of India to control social media intermediaries and digital media platforms. These rules derive from Section 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, and aim to impose obligations on intermediaries to ensure an open, safe and reliable Internet in India.
The rules require intermediaries, such as WhatsApp, to inform users of the platform’s rules, prevent prohibited content, appoint compliance officers, establish complaint redressal mechanisms and identify the source of information. However, critics argue that these rules may harm freedom of expression by imposing restrictions on the removal of content, lack of clarity in the definition of intermediaries, and raise issues regarding the calculation of user numbers.
Organizations like the The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) also raised concerns that the rules significantly harm privacy rights in the country and interfere with the right to freedom of speech and expression.
Through The Times of India