Date:15/02/19

Indian government wants to slide into users’ WhatsApp messages

Over 250 million Indians use WhatsApp for communication each day. With so much information being sent daily, it comes as no surprise that some of it might even be criminal or illegal. What you talk about on private chats is no one else’s business, but only as long as it doesn’t harm anyone. To safeguard its citizens, the government of India wants in on your WhatsApp messages and mitigate hazards.
 
WhatsApp is one of Facebook’s most important properties, with over a billion users worldwide. In India, the app is being used to spread hate, violence, child porn, false information, and the authorities want to stop that. The officials are demanding access to the chats of all Indians, which means they will be going through all the bits of encrypted and protected data. Failure in coming to a consensus may lead to WhatsApp getting banned in the country entirely.
 
“For six months, we’ve been telling them to bring more accountability to their platform but what have they done? So pedophiles can go about on WhatsApp fully secure that they won’t get caught. It is absolutely evil,” said representative of the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology Gopalakrishnan S.
 
Facebook has refused these demands, explaining that it will take a lot of effort and reprogramming the app entirely to make it visible to a few parties. Carl Woog, Head of Communications at WhatsApp said that this encroaches upon the app’s privacy policy. He further added that they are already strict with the content being shared, and around 2,50,000 accounts are banned each month on basis of them getting reported.
 
This is a Catch-22 situation, with both the parties need each other to sustain. For a developing country like India, WhatsApp has been pivotal in bringing millions of users online. And for WhatsApp, this could cost them a quarter of a billion users which I am pretty sure, is a big part of their future plans, especially when they are testing out new ways of monetizing its users.
 
While this does impose the case of internet privacy and encroachment upon one’s Freedom of Speech, you need to remember that FoS does not give you the power to say whatever and get away with it without facing any consequences. I do understand why Facebook cannot comply with this, even when they want to, but if the app is indeed being used for the wrong purposes, it needs to be controlled. Finding a convenient middle-ground is the only way, and it’s not going to be easy. But as Albus Dumbledore said, "choose the right path, not the easy one."

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