WhatsApp will leave India, if asked to break encryption

WhatsApp would rather leave India, than break its encrypted messages and phone calls. This is what the social media platform, told Delhi High Court on Thursday. WhatsApp made it clear that if it is made to break encryption of messages, then the social message platform would exit India. “As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” counsel for the platform told the bench of acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora.

WhatsApp said that people use its platform because end-to-end messages are encrypted, ensuring privacy. End-to-end encryption is a private communication system in which only communicating users can participate. The court is hearing petitions filed by WhatsApp LLC and its parent company Facebook Inc (now Meta), challenging the 2021 Information Technology (IT) rules for social media intermediaries requiring the messaging app to trace chats and make provisions to identify the first originator of information, for hearing on August 14. Rule 4(2) of IT Rules says that a significant social media intermediary that provides services like messaging shall allow the identification of the ‘the first originator’ of a message when an order to this effect is passed by a court or by the competent authority.

WhatsApp told the court that the provision in question of IT Rules would require WhatsApp to store millions and millions of messages for a number of years, a requirement that exists nowhere else in the world. “We will have to keep a complechain 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 a number of years,” the platform told the court.

The lawyer, appearing for the platform, said the Rule under challenge goes beyond the parent Information Technology Act, which does not provide for breaking of encryption.

The bench, observing that the matter would have to be argued by the parties, asked him if the issue had been considered in any other country. “There is no such rule anywhere else in the world. Not even in Brazil,” he said. Meanwhile, the central government’s standing counsel said the idea behind the Rule is to trace the originator of the message. Millions of Whatsapp users in India depend on the social media platform for their daily use – right from messages, phones to file sharing.