Accessing user chats may not be mandatory
The government’s new rules may not force platforms to break end- to- end encryption technology used by messaging apps to protect user privacy. According to experts, messaging apps can “fingerprint” text messages in order to find the originator without having to read the content of these messages.
New rules require such platforms to trace messages back to their originator within India.
“With the present end-to-end encryption standards that apps follow, they need to do a bit of tweaking, without creating backdoors,” said Sudhir Naidu, who runs Troop Messenger, a work collaboration platform that includes both messaging and video and is used by the ministry of defence of an EU nation, among other.
Naidu explained that apps could figure out a way to place a unique identifier for each message, which can then be traced back across senders without needing to read the message content. “It will certainly place some burden on the app, but it is totally doable without requiring platforms to read the content of the message. Some platforms may choose not to take that burden and could leave the country,” he added.
A security expert, requesting anonymity, said the protocols needed to fingerprint messages could, by themselves, compromise encryption if they’re not done right. Ensuring you can fingerprint messages without reading content will require more man-hours and research costs, he added. Platforms will need to be incentivized to do so, by government directives or financial incentives.
Whether a platform chooses to lose the Indian market will depend on how many users it has here and what revenues it can earn. For instance, while both Signal and Telegram have gained millions of users from India over the past two months, WhatsApp has 530 million users in the country, according to the government.
Experts agree that this will lead to greater surveillance by platforms, which will have to collect more information about users’ messages. According to a senior executive at a top messaging app, it may lead to more users distrusting platforms and being unable to speak openly, even on private messaging apps. WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal refused to comment.