WhatsApp Sues Indian Government Over New Internet Rules

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government over new internet rules it claims are unconstitutional and will “severely undermine the privacy” of its users.

The new internet rule will require it to trace every message sent on its service, violating users' right to privacy of nearly 400 million users in India, The New York Times reports.

The Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, which was introduced in February and comes into effect on Wednesday contains a requirement that messaging apps identify the “first originator of information” when asked.

The spokesperson for the service said in a statement that giving out the information of the message originator will break end-to-end encryption and lead to abuse.

“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to “trace” private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse,”

“WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so.”

WhatsApp’s warnings about “traceability” are backed by many of the world’s biggest technology firms and digital rights groups including Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Center for Democracy and Technology.

In a statement about a similar plan to mandate traceability in Brazil, the EFF said that implementing traceability “will break users’ expectations of privacy and security, and would be hard to implement to match current security and privacy standards,” Theverge reported.

WhatsApp has published an FAQ on its website responding to efforts by India and other countries to force it to trace messages. It argues that this traceability requirement would force it to break the end-to-end encryption for everyone on its service because there’s no way for it to proactively know what message a government might want to investigate ahead of time.

“A government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance,” WhatsApp’s FAQ says.

A government official argued that WhatsApp isn’t asked to break its encryption, just to track where messages originate from, Reuters reported.

According to Reuters, WhatsApp argues that the new rules fail the tests established by a 2017 Supreme Court ruling. Namely, that privacy must be preserved except when legality, necessity, and proportionality require its infringement. WhatsApp argues that the new law lacks explicit parliamentary backing.