Meta-owned social media app, WhatsApp, has threatened to leave India if asked to change its end-to-end encryption and user data policies.
The Mark Zuckerberg company has challenged India’s 2021 IT rules for social media that a messaging service should reveal the message sender’s name, at the Delhi High Court.
As per the Indian rule, messaging apps are required to trace chats and make provisions to identify the first originator of information.
Meta is naturally opposed to such regulation as the messages on all its platforms, including WhatsApp and Messenger, are now end-to-end encrypted, which means that only the sender and receiver have access to the message.
The tech company has also shown reluctance to share user data to the government.
In its petition, WhatsApp has sought that the rule be declared “unconstitutional and that no criminal liability should accrue to it for non-compliance”.
Tejas Karia, representing WhatsApp in the court, said: “If we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes.”
“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 several years,” Karia added. “There is no such rule anywhere else in the world.”
