GOVT SEEKS ACCESS TO WHATSAPP MESSAGES
BENGALURU: India’s government dealt retail giants Amazon.com and Walmart a devastating blow this year with new policies undermining their growth plans. Now US social media pioneers Facebook and Twitter are in danger of suffering similar setbacks in what is perhaps the world’s most important emerging technology market.
In the latest skirmish, the government is targeting Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp, the popular messaging service increasingly important to its parent’s bottom line. Frustrated that the service has been used to incite violence and spread pornography, the government is pressing WhatsApp to allow more official oversight of online discussions, even if that means giving officials access to protected, or encrypted, messages. Facebook has refused, risking punitive measures or even the possibility of a shutdown in its biggest market.
“For six months, we’ve been telling them to bring more accountability to their platform but what have they done?” said Gopalakrishnan S, a senior official in the ministry of electronics and information technology known as MEITY. “So pedophiles can go about on WhatsApp fully secure that they won’t get caught. It is absolutely evil.”
WhatsApp spokesman Carl Woog said the government’s demands run counter to the company’s privacy policies and compliance would mean ending the service’s privacy protections. “What is contemplated by the rules is not possible today given the end-toend encryption that we provide and it would require us to re-architect WhatsApp, leading us to a different product, one that would not be fundamentally private,” said Woog in a roundtable last week. Still, he said WhatsApp has a zero-tolerance policy around child sexual abuse, and that about 250,000 accounts are banned each month for sharing vile content. ‘We ban users from WhatsApp if we become aware they are sharing content that exploits or endangers children,’ he said.
Facebook’s strategy will only become more reliant on encryption. The company recently said it would be adding default encryption to users’ chats on Messenger and Instagram in the next year or so. With end-to-end encryption, not even Facebook can see what its users are saying to each other, meaning it has no way to police the content. Officials want more access to WhatsApp messages themselves so they can hold people accountable. “If telecom companies like Airtel, Jio and BSNL are mandated to maintain call records, why should WhatsApp get a different rule?” Gopalakrishnan said in a telephone interview. “We don’t care about the good morning and divorce messages that are shared, we only want traceability to prevent or detect crimes.”