The Indian Government has no intensions of violating the privacy of people, said the Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasa , hours after the WhatsApp application sued the Centre over India’s new rules for Information Technology ( IT )
None of the things that were proposed by India would put any effect on the normal functioning of WhatsApp in any way , Prasad stated. There will be no effect on common people either, he said additionally.
The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 require major social media halfway’—platforms with over five million people to trace the centre of particular texts sent on service. It calls for appointment of a residential grievance officer, nodal contact person and chief compliance office and to publish the fine details of executives on their website, with an address too .
According to a WhatsApp spokesperson , it was stated that “requiring the messaging application to trace the chats is the same of asking us to keep a fingerprint of every text sent on WhatsApp application, which would hamper the end-to-end encryption and fundamentally infringe with people’s right to privacy.”
The company also said that “Meanwhile, we will manage to engage with the Indian Govt on solutions focused at keeping people safe, including the responding to valid legal requests for the information that is available to us”.
Facebook and Google had stated on Tuesday that they are trying to agree with the new rules.