New Delhi: Following the deadline by the Government of India to comply with the new rules for social media intermediaries, which needs them to make provisions for “identification of the first originator of the information”, Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has moved the Delhi High Court challenging this aspect of the new rules, Indian Express reported. The petition was filed on May 25, the final date of compliance.
According to the report, in its plea, it is learnt WhatsApp is invoking the 2017 Justice K S Puttaswamy vs Union of India case to argue that the traceability provision is unconstitutional and against people’s fundamental right to privacy as underlined by the Supreme Court decision. It has prayed to declare traceability unconstitutional and stop it from coming into force, along with preventing criminal liability to its employees for non compliance.
“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 said.
“We have consistently joined civil society and experts around the world in opposing requirements that would violate the privacy of our users. 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,” the spokesperson added.
It is contending that traceability was contradictory to the concept of end-to-end encryption which tries to prevent others from finding out who send a message. According to WhatsApp, traceability would force private companies to collect and store “who-said-what and who-shared-what” data for billions of messages daily just for the requirement of law enforcement agencies, the report said.
The messaging platform believes it is imposable to understand the original context of many messages given that users are used to copy pasting content seen on websites or social media platforms. It also says traceability cannot be implemented in a way which prevents tampering of the data given the massive scale and opened up such platforms to new vulnerabilities and makes them less secure.
In a new webpage that went live today, the report said WhatsApp argues that “traceability inverts the way law enforcement typically investigates crimes”. “In a typical law enforcement request, a government requests technology companies provide account information about a known individual’s account. With traceability, a government would provide a technology company a piece of content and ask who sent it first,” the post reasons.
The post titled, ‘What is traceability and why does WhatsApp oppose it?’ says: “In order to trace even one message, services would have to trace every message. That’s because there is no way to predict which message a government would want to investigate in the future. In doing so, a government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.”
On Tuesday, Facebook had said it aimed to comply with the provisions of Information Technology rules and was in discussion with the government on a few more issues.
