Govt concerned firm didn’t raise issue earlier

NEW DELHI: The Indian government is concerned over Whatsapp’sfailuretodisclose thefact that the messaging platform had been misused to spy on around 1,400 people worldwide, including several human rights activists, lawyers and journalists and lawyers in India, a government official said on Friday.

“The company did not share any information with us about the attack when it took place. If there was any information, the government could have taken steps to stop it,” said a senior information technology ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

On Thursday, Whatsapp said

Indian citizens, including former Union minister Praful Patel and former Lok Sabha MP Santosh Bharatiya, were among the those globally spied upon by unnamed entities using a spyware called Pegasus, developed by Israel-based NSO Group.

“Government of India is concerned at the breach of the privacy of citizens of India on the messaging platform Whatsapp. We have asked Whatsapp to explain the kind of breach and what it is doing to safeguard the privacy of millions of Indian citizens,” IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad tweeted on Thursday.

On Friday, Whatsapp said that it wanted to work with the Indian government to safeguard the privacy of its Indian users.

NEWDELHI:THE rotational arrangement for the chief minister’s office the Shiv Sena is seeking in Maharashtra has been tried before with limited success in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh (UP). The stakeholders kept their part of the bargain only in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) when it was a full-fledged state of the Union.

Such pacts didn’t last in the past largely because they were arrived at out of political expediency between ideologically opposed entities.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was the common factor in