WhatsApp has just shown its 3 billion users just how seriously it takes their security—and it may mean hundreds of millions losing access to the app…If you ever needed a signal as to how seriously WhatsApp takes its security, then you need look no further than its biggest market. The Meta owned messenger—the largest in the world—has just threatened to leave India rather than compromise encryption.
This legislation mandates that law enforcement can use the courts to force a social media company to disclose the sender of an original message, such that dangerous or illegal content can be traced to source. Clearly that means not only sharing the identities of those sending messages, but breaking the security around the content itself, to link that back to the relevant user.
The lawyer went on to explain that if it were to adhere—which it won’t, then it would require the storage of “millions and millions of messages for a number of years,” given that “we don't know which messages will be asked to be decrypted.” To which the reply was very simple: “There is no such rule anywhere else in the world, not even Brazil.”