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Messaging service WhatsApp is filing a lawsuit against the Indian government in the Delhi High Court, challenging the new rules, forcing it to break its encryption and potentially revealing the identity of the person who sent and received billions of messages on its platform.Reuters First report A WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed the lawsuit to BuzzFeed News.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News: “Civil society and technology experts around the world have always believed that the requirement to’track’ private messages will break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse.” “WhatsApp is committed to protecting people’s personal information. Privacy, we will continue to do our best to achieve this within the scope of Indian law.”
At the time of publication of this story, a spokesperson for the Ministry of IT in India did not respond to a request for comment.
Of the 1.2 billion people on WhatsApp owned by Facebook, more than 400 million are from India.
Since 2016, messages and files sent via WhatsApp have been encrypted, which means that no one but the sender and receiver can see their content. WhatsApp has long said that this is important for people’s privacy.But governments around the world, including United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Japan There has been pressure on apps like WhatsApp to crack the encryption technology because it is impossible to track who the information is sent to, which poses a challenge to law enforcement.Digital rights organizations like this Visit now, This Electronic Frontier Foundation, with Mozilla Support WhatsApp’s struggle to maintain end-to-end encryption.
India recently promulgated IT rules A messaging platform like WhatsApp is required to provide a way to track the identity of the sender of any message. The new regulations come into effect today.
in a Blog post On the official website released late Tuesday, WhatsApp stated “[a] Governments that choose to enforce traceability are effectively enforcing a new form of large-scale surveillance. “
It also said that traceability would violate human rights. The WhatsApp post said: “Innocent people may get into trouble or even go to jail because of the content of the investigation. Even if they didn’t mean to cause any harm to them at the beginning, they later became a problem in the eyes of the government.” “Anyone wrote. Any threats can be traced back to them. This deprives people of their privacy. Even in private situations, it will have a chilling effect on what people say, violating the recognized principles of freedom of speech and human rights.”
For global technology giants, India is a huge and important market. But recently, these companies have been under pressure from an increasingly authoritarian government headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.Early this week, the Delhi police Visited The Twitter office behind the platform marked some tweets from members of the ruling party as “media manipulation.”
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