Union IT Minister Ashwini Vaishna has said that WhatsApp and Meta have not informed the government about rumors that it will discontinue services in India. Under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, there were reports that WhatsApp might be forced to discontinue its services in India due to government directives to share user details.
In response to a question raised by a Congress member in the Rajya Sabha recently, WhatsApp and its parent company Meta said they have not announced any plans to discontinue their services in India. WhatsApp had approached the High Court against the Information Technology Rules, which were implemented in 2021.
In its plea, WhatsApp had claimed that the company was being forced to break end-to-end encryption in the messaging service, which violated fundamental rights to privacy and freedom of speech.
The law included that when ordered by a court or other competent authority, it should be possible to identify the first source of any information (text, photo, video, etc.) on its platform.
It is not known which messages are being asked to be decrypted. So millions of messages will have to be kept for years," the company told the court. There are several petitions on the subject in various High Courts, including Karnataka, Madras, Calcutta, Kerala and Bombay.
