NEW DELHI: With the aim to protect privacy of individuals on social networking platforms like WhatsApp, Centre on Tuesday informed the Supreme Court that it was in the process of putting in place a legal framework.
Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi told the five-judge constitution bench that the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) was working on a law for data protection and it would be in place before Diwali this year. He requested the court to defer the case for a couple of weeks so that the government’s stand would be better understood. However, the Bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra fixed the matter for further hearing on April 27 and asked senior advocate Harish Salve, who is appearing for the petitioner, to formulate the issues.
On April 5, the court had referred the matter of privacy policy on WhatsApp to a constitution bench. The court had on January 16 sought responses from the Centre and the TRAI on a plea that privacy of over 157 million Indians had been infringed upon by social networking sites - WhatsApp and
Facebook - for alleged commercial use of personal communication. The court was hearing the plea of Karmanya Singh Sareen, a student, who had sought the intervention of TRAI to regulate use of data that belongs to Indians.
On 25 August 2016, WhatsApp notified users to accept recent changes in its terms and conditions, which included allowing WhatsApp to pass information about them to its parent company Facebook for commercial use. WhatApp’s new privacy policy allows it to collect and share information about its users with Facebook and all its group companies.
The Delhi High Court had earlier restrained WhatsApp, an instant messaging application, from sharing with Facebook the user information existing up to September 25, 2016, when its new privacy policy came into effect. It had also directed WhatsApp to delete the information/data of those who had opted out of the service before September 25, 2016 and not to share them with Facebook or its group companies.
The high court had also directed the Centre and TRAI to examine the feasibility of bringing the functioning of internet messaging applications under statutory regulatory framework.
WhatsApp had earlier informed the high court that when a user account was deleted, the information of
that person was no longer retained on its servers.