Privacy Matters

THE NEED FOR the state to pry into the private communications of individuals goes back a long time. As far back as the mid-1980s, the Rajiv Gandhi government had brought in a bill that permitted the govern­ment to open letters, this being before the time of emails and mobile phones. Parliament passed it but the only rea­son it didn’t become law was because the then President Giani Zail Singh sat on it without giving assent. Since then, the idea that private communications are not sacrosanct has only become more entrenched. Every terrorist attack is a justification to intrude into phones and messages. But now there seems to be a small hurdle that tech­nology has created in the consensus.

In Delhi High Court, the lawyer for WhatsApp recently gave something of an ultimatum. WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted. The IT laws make it incum­bent on providers to trace the first origi­nation of messages and they would have to do away with such encryption. WhatsApp said it cannot remove it and would rather just shut the show and leave. In their website, they state that privacy is at the core of their DNA and for the moment at least they seem to be taking it seriously.

This creates something of a prob­lem. It is the most popular messaging app in India with over 500 million users. WhatsApp leaving India by itself should not prevent its use by Indians. The government will need to actively ban it like TikTok. Only a relatively small younger cohort of Indians were beholden to TikTok but when half-a-billion Indians suddenly see their messaging ability and groups become defunct, there will be some annoyance and that is something which will have to be factored in. Size does matter.

One of the things that WhatsApp stated in court was that removing the encryption was not something that they did in any other country in the world. Also, it won’t be the only technology company that has its roots abroad which will face such a dilemma. Apple, for instance, is also hardwired to not compromise on the privacy of its users. If the government still insists on their right, it leaves the possibility open for other such companies to be forced to leave. Recently, the social media platform X was planning to leave Brazil because it wouldn’t accept orders to block accounts. There seems to be some shift in the willingness of these platforms to comply with governments that force them to act against their users. It might not altogether even be a matter of principle. By compromising abroad, they harm their image with users, investors and advertisers in their home and other markets.

Indians might worry about WhatsApp leaving but they don’t really care too much about privacy, even though it has been made a fundamen­tal right by the Supreme Court. Just as they don’t care if their data is being used by these platforms to make money. Pri­vacy is not a make or break issue here. Not having a free service they are used to is a different matter.

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