WhatsApp is suing the Indian government for law requiring trackable messages

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government for a law that requires WhatsApp to make messages trackable. The company calls the law ineffective and says it is susceptible to abuse.

With the lawsuit, WhatsApp wants to prevent the Indian government from putting the new law into effect, writes The New York Times. Under the law, proposed in February and due to go into effect Wednesday, chat services like WhatsApp should create ‘trackable’ databases of all messages sent. In addition, the company should attach identifiable ‘fingerprints’ to messages that users send among themselves.

WhatsApp says it has no insight into user data and that the tracking rules cannot be implemented in practice. The ‘threat’ that sent messages can be traced back to a person takes away someone’s privacy, WhatsApp writes. The law would also have an impact on the security of the chat service and in practice ‘break’ end-to-end encryption.

According to Reuters, the Indian government wants to use the law to ensure that the first source of information can be identified. By law, the government could ask chat services who the first, original source of a message is. The government is said to be mainly about fake news and the government contradicts WhatsApp’s claim that the new law violates end-to-end encryption.

India has recently become increasingly tougher towards social media companies. The government wants these companies to take ‘fake news’ about the corona pandemic and the Indian government’s approach to stop the pandemic offline. Earlier this week, Indian police went to Twitter’s office in India after Twitter labeled messages from, among others, a spokesperson for India’s largest party as ‘manipulated media’.