The deadline of the central government’s IT compliance policies for the tech giants yesterday caused a great storm amongst the companies. While Twitter was served a stern message when Delhi Police paid a visit to its office, a flustered Facebook took pre-emptive measures and announced that it was ready to comply with the provisions of the IT rules.
“We aim to comply with the provisions of the IT rules and continue to discuss a few of the issues which need more engagement with the government. Pursuant to the IT rules, we are working to implement operational processes and improve efficiencies” a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying by ANI.
Reported by TFI, social media platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, and Twitter run the risk of losing their status as “intermediaries” and may become liable for criminal action if they do not comply with the revised regulations. India has fixed five million registered users as the threshold for defining a significant social media intermediary. The government had announced the policy change in February earlier this year and the deadline granted was May 25, which elapsed yesterday.
The sweeping changes in the policy include the compulsion for the aforementioned companies to follow additional due diligence, including the appointment of a chief compliance officer, nodal contact person and resident grievance officer.
While Mark Zuckerberg gave up his one entity Facebook to satisfy the government’s wrath, the billionaire on the same day used his other platform WhatsApp to lodge a case against the Indian government. According to news reports, Facebook-owned WhatsApp filed a case in the Delhi High Court on Tuesday, May 25, seeking a stay on the compliance policy.
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.
This is the same WhatsApp that has shoved its unilateral and at the same time, dictatorial privacy policy down the throat of millions of its Indian users without giving any option to opt-out. Thus, it is a bit rich coming from Mark Zuckerberg when he accepts the policy for Facebook but contends against it under the banner of WhatsApp in court.
Meanwhile, as reported by TFI extensively, the centre’s message to Twitter is clear – if you decide not to comply with the laws in India, we will not hesitate to take you down. Today, it might be the Twitter offices, but we will not shy away from coming knocking on the doors of your India executives’ homes.
The Narendra Modi government has realised that Twitter’s commitment is to destabilise the present establishment and to target the tremendous conservative ecosystem of the country. The Jack Dorsey owned platform has so far not agreed to comply with the new policy change and it will be interesting to see where the tussle between the government and Twitter is headed.
Facebook said: “Those who don’t comply with latest WhatsApp’s Privacy Policies will be removed”.
So on one hand, WhatsApp forcing their new Privacy Policies against their platform Users doesn’t violate or undermines “people’s right to privacy”? but on other hand, argues & challenges India’s “New Digital Rules” will End To User Privacy.
Hope the GOI’s lawyer will focus on this point during the court hearings.
WhatsApp will not have to breach end-to-end-encryption to follow the new IT guidelines. This information can be retrieved from metadata.
Metadata doesn’t contain the actual message transmitted, but has the technical info about the message being transmitted; like – headers, tokens, identifiers, timestamps, etc. Every message a user sends, has a unique identifier attached to it, which doesn’t read the content of the message but can be used to identify the message.
It’s based on such metadata that the ‘forwards’ and ‘forwarded-many-times’ messages are identified and are operated upon. And it’s on the same lines even the originator of the message can be traced to.
Totally agree. The GOI should consult software experts to come up with technical details to counter the WhatsApp’s stupid argument and trash their narrative in the court and win this case.