The Indian government’s proposal to make it mandatory for online platforms to trace the origin of unlawful messages is ‘overbroad’ and will require WhatsApp to re-architect the product into one without privacy, a spokesperson for the instant messaging app said on Wednesday.
The firm, however, did not elaborate on the plans for India, its largest market with over 200 million users, if the proposal is accepted.
“The proposed changes are overbroad and not consistent with the strong privacy protections that are important to people everywhere, not just in India but around the world,” Carl Woog, head of communications at WhatApp, said in reply to a question.
He added, “What is contemplated by the rules is not possible today, given the end-to-end encryption that we provide and it will require us to re-architect WhatsApp, leading to a different product — one that will not be fundamentally private. Imagine if every message that you sent was kept with a record of the fact that you sent it and record of your phone number. And that would not be a place for private communication.”
The government and WhatsApp have been at loggerheads over the issue of tracing the origin of fake messages. The Facebook-owned instant messaging platform has said on multiple occasions that it would not comply with the government’s demand as it would undermine the privacy of WhatsApp users.
The government, on the other hand, said that it did not want WhatsApp to decrypt and read messages, but insisted that it should be able to trace the origin of messages that lead to serious crimes. Mr. Woog stressed that WhatsApp ‘cares deeply about creating a space for private conversations online’ and that it was a private messaging platform. Asked if the company would quit India if the proposed norms are adopted, Mr. Woog said the company would take one step at a time.
Limits on group sizes
Matt Jones, a software engineer at WhatsApp, stressed that the platform was built for private messaging. “We are not here to give people a microphone, we are here for private messaging…We place limits on group sizes and how users send messages,” he said,
elaborating that the platform used machine learning to crackdown on automated and bulk messaging.
WhatsApp, which has 1.5 billion monthly active users, bans about 2 million accounts every month.
Mr. Woog said that over the past several months, the U.S.-based firm had also been engaging with political parties to explain that WhatsApp was not a broadcast platform. “It is not a place to send messages at scale and also to explain to them that we will be banning accounts that will engage in automated robot behaviour.”
“We will expand this effort and work with the Election Commission of India in the lead up to the national election in 2019,” the messaging platform said. On Thursday, the Parliamentary Committee on IT will meet representatives of the IT Ministry and Twitter to discuss issues related to ‘safeguarding citizens’ rights’ on such platforms.
Published - February 06, 2019 10:53 pm IST
