Two days after WhatsApp CEO Chris Daniels met IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, the government has reiterated its demand that origin of fake messages should be traced and the Facebook-owned instant messaging platform should explore a technical solution for the same.
Yesterday there was a news report which said that WhatsApp has agreed to meet all government demands except message traceability.
The Facebook-owned messenger service is believed to have told the government that the company has no access to the user data (it’s encrypted end-to-end) and tampering with that will strike at its key feature — complete privacy to the user.
A WhatsApp spokesperson has said in the report, “Building traceability would undermine end-to-end encryption and the private nature of WhatsApp, creating the potential for serious misuse. WhatsApp will not weaken the privacy protections we provide”. He added that people rely on WhatsApp for all kinds of “sensitive conversations”, including with their doctors, banks and families.
The assertion by the government came after WhatsApp said it will not weaken the privacy protections on the platform. “Requiring traceability would undermine end-to-end encryption and the private nature of WhatsApp, creating the potential for serious misuse,” Carl Woog, WhatsApp spokesperson, said. It must be mentioned that after the meeting with Daniels, Prasad had briefed the media saying that WhatsApp would try to work out a technological solution for tracing the origin of any sinister message.
Tracing the origin of fake messages has been a lingering tussle between the government and WhatsApp. The company had earlier also expressed its inability to trace the origin of messages citing privacy of consumers, thereby triggering a controversy. The government, on its part, has also made it clear to the American firm that platforms like WhatsApp cannot run away from their responsibility of checking the menace of fake news by citing privacy as an excuse.
Reiterating its stand, sources in the Electronics and IT Ministry on Thursday said WhatsApp should give a more firm assurance of compliance with Indian laws. The company should establish a grievance office with a wide network and set up an Indian corporate entity subject to Indian laws in a defined timeframe, a source said.
Regarding traceability, the source said, “(WhatsApp) should continue to explore technical innovations whereby in case of large-scale circulation of provocative and nefarious messages leading to violence and crime, the origin can be ascertained.”
Latest from WhatsApp on launching its payment service in India and mob lynchings
As per today’s news report in the Economic Times, Google and other payment services are getting “unfair” advantage over WhatsApp under India’s regulatory regime and WhatsApp is looking at other countries for a full-scale launch, people familiar with the thinking within the messaging service said.
ET has stated that the following comments are off the record:-
WhatsApp’s regulatory compliance is at a similar level to Google’s, but WhatsApp is being “singled out”, the person quoted earlier said. WhatsApp’s payment service is in beta mode and the government has said the messaging service must comply with full data localisation.
Google’s service has been rolled out fully, executives in the company told ET.
Government officials say full launch of WhatsApp’s payment service cannot be divorced from the company’s responses to official demands on combating fake news. Also, the IT ministry feels that WhatsApp is not following the same two-factor authentication as Google’s payment service. In letters to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) and the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the ministry has also asked questions about data sharing practices between WhatsApp and Facebook along with the company’s data storage policies.
WhatsApp is prepared for data mirroring – storing India data in India while also in foreign servers – and it will have to rethink strategy if it means hosting data in India only, another person said.
Full data localisation will mean “redesigning for India only, and that will slow down innovation for India”, the person added.
On ‘Mob Lynchings’ WhatsApp has said ‘it has made product design changes and is working with law enforcement agencies.’
The company’s Chief Operating Officer Matthew Idema had also met IT secretary Ajay Sawhney last month. To check viral circulation of messages, WhatsApp had recently announced that it would limit forwards of photos, videos and messages to five chats in India and remove the quick forward button next to media messages. Also, the platform is testing a label that marks links sent on chats as ‘suspicious’ in its bid to check the spread of fake news and misinformation. It has also limited the number of people to whom you can forward a message to five.
Source: Forbes India
Meanwhile, in a related development, Telecom Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said that the government has taken a stern view of false news doing the rounds on social media platforms and asked WhatsApp to take urgent measures to curb the circulation of such messages. She, however, said the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) does not intend to impose a blanket ban on messaging apps and platforms.
“…we cannot go around blocking the whole platform. The idea is to evolve effective grievance redressal…targeted prevention or corrective action to be taken in those kinds of cases,” she said, when asked about abuse of messaging platforms in spreading fake messages. The DoT had recently sought views from industry players regarding banning of mobile apps like Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, etc., in situations where national security and public order were under threat.
Sundararajan said technical solutions such as analysis of metadata, artificial intelligence and others allowed identification of mischievous messages treading unusual patterns.
“So, a lot of these solutions have to do with technology but it cannot be blocking of all apps. That is not the intent at all…we should be able to go in and take corrective action…you can’t have all or nothing approach,” she added.
The government is taking the misuse of social media platforms seriously. Prasad had also informed in the Parliament last month that the government would consider changes in rules that would require social media platforms to locate their grievance officer in India.
This is as per news reports in Business Standard.