Messaging service WhatsApp is suing the Indian government in the Delhi High Court, challenging new rules that would force it to break its encryption, potentially revealing the identities of people who had sent and received billions of messages on its platform. Reuters first reported the lawsuit, which a WhatsApp spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News.
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, a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of peoples personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so.
A spokesperson for Indias IT ministry did not return a request for comment by the time this story was published.
More than 400 million of the 1.2 billion people who use WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, are from India.
Since 2016, messages and files sent through WhatsApp have been encrypted, which means that nobody except the sender and the receiver can see their contents. WhatsApp has long said that this is important for peoples privacy. But governments around the world, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and Japan have been pressuring apps like WhatsApp to break that encryption, saying that not being able to track who sent what poses a challenge for law enforcement. Digital rights organizations like Access Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Mozilla have supported WhatsApps fight to maintain end-to-end encryption.
Indias recently enacted IT rules require messaging platforms like WhatsApp to trace content back to senders. They also grant Indias government power to ask platforms that take down content that goes against decency or morality and threatens national security and public order. If companies do not comply with the new rules, their employees can face criminal action.
In a blog post on its official website published late on Tuesday, WhatsApp said that “[a] government that chooses to mandate traceability is effectively mandating a new form of mass surveillance.”
It also said that traceability would violate human rights. Innocent people could get caught up in investigations, or even go to jail for sharing content that later becomes a problem in the eyes of a government even if they did not mean any harm by sharing it in the first place, WhatsApps post said. The threat that anything someone writes can be traced back to them takes away peoples privacy and would have a chilling effect on what people say even in private settings, violating universally recognized principles of free expression and human rights.
India is a large and important market for global technology giants. But in recent times, these companies have been facing pressure from an increasingly authoritarian government led by prime minister Narendra Modi. Last month, India ordered Twitter, Facebook Instagram and YouTube to block content critical of the governments handling of the coronavirus pandemic. Earlier this week, police in Delhi visited Twitters offices after the platform labeled some tweets by members of the ruling party as manipulated media.