KOCHI : Emphasising on the primacy of user privacy, WhatsApp has pointed out that citizens will not speak freely for fear that their private communications will be traced and used against them, which is antithetical to the very purpose of end-to-end encryption, if such communication is revealed.
The company stated so in its writ petition before the High Court seeking to set aside the Thiruvananthapuram additional chief judicial magistrate court’s order to issue a notice to a WhatsApp representative for the company’s failure to provide Cyber Police officials with the account details of a person who uploaded the obscene videos of a Kilimanoor woman on the app. The court has stayed the magistrate’ order.
The petition filed by WhatsApp LLC representative Brian Hennessy said the end-to-end encrypted messaging service allows people to communicate privately and securely. “WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption ensures that all personal communications can be decrypted only by the recipient. No one else, not even the company, can read or listen to end-to-end encrypted communications or determine their contents. End-to-end encryption thus prevents the petitioner from being able to determine who said what on WhatsApp. WhatsApp thus enables government officials, law enforcement, journalists, members of ethnic or religious groups, scholars, teachers, students, and the like to exercise their right to freedom of speech and expression without fear of retaliation,” Hennessy said.
The Meta-owned company made it clear that it does not store information regarding the original uploader or sender of a message. Hence, WhatsApp informed the Cyber Police it is unable to produce the required information.
To ensure the safety of users, the app had limited the ability of users to forward messages to just five chats at once. This was initially imposed in India in 2018 to curb the virality of unlawful content. This change has resulted in a 25% reduction in forwarding behaviour globally, approximately one billion forwards per day, making WhatsApp one of the few technology companies to intentionally constrain sharing, the company stated.
WhatsApp said that requiring intermediaries “to enable the identification of the first originator of the information” in India on end-to-end encrypted messaging services constitutes a dangerous invasion of privacy. This would require the company to build the ability to identify the first originator of every communication sent in India on its platform, as there is no way to predict which message will be the subject of such an order seeking first originator information.
Meta’s claims
WhatsApp does not store information regarding the original uploader or sender of a message
To ensure safety, the app had limited the ability of users to forward messages to just five chats at once
This was initially imposed in India in 2018 to curb the virality of unlawful content