WhatsApp threatens exit over encryption
“WhatsApp Threatens Exit Over Encryption Demand, Delhi High Court Told”
WhatsApp, owned by Meta, has warned the Delhi High Court that it will cease operations in India if compelled to break message encryption.
Legal representatives conveyed to the court, “As a platform, we are saying [that] if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes.”
The platform emphasized that users choose WhatsApp for its end-to-end encryption, ensuring privacy, and that compromising this would damage trust.
The court was addressing petitions filed by WhatsApp and Meta, contesting Rule 4(2) of the Information Technology Rules, 2021.
Rule 4(2) requires significant social media intermediaries to enable the identification of the first originator of information on their platforms when ordered by a court or competent authority.
Advocate Tejas Karia, representing WhatsApp, explained that this rule would necessitate storing vast amounts of messages for many years, which is not required elsewhere.
“We will have to keep a complete chain and we don’t know which messages will be asked to be decrypted. It means millions and millions of messages will have to be stored for a number of years,” Karia stated.
He also stressed that the rule goes beyond the parent Information Technology Act, which does not mandate breaking encryption.
