WhatsApp Sues India Government

WhatsApp has sued the Indian government challenging the second largest internet market's new regulations that could allow authorities to make people's private messages "traceable," and conduct mass surveillance. From a report: The Facebook-owned instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market by users, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi's "traceability" requirement -- which would require WhatsApp to help New Delhi identify the originator of a particular message -- violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy.

"Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to 'trace' private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people's personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so," WhatsApp said in a statement. India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. The suggestion came at a time when WhatsApp was grappling with containing spread of false information in India, where circulation of such information had resulted in multiple real-life casualties. But its suggestion didn't become the law until this year. Traceability requirement is part of New Delhi's sweeping IT rules that also require social media firms to appoint several officers in India to address on-ground concerns, and also gives authorities greater power over taking down posts it deems offensive. Further reading: India says WhatsApp's lawsuit over new regulations a clear act of defiance.

start at home

[noise-randomizer]

and sue the nsa.

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[FudRucker]

i bet facebook, instagram, messenger & WhatsApp is run by the NSA, CIA, FBI and any other federal alphabet goonsquad & spooksquad that wants to investigate somebody

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[noise-randomizer]

good point: so it's to keep up appearances? or do they actually believe their own propaganda? probably just about the revenue stream drying up.

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[ericspinder]

Whataboutism is always a bad look.

Facebook protecting privacy?

[jlar]

Facebook trying to protect the privacy of their users is like a hooker arguing against sex before marriage. Or at least that they have sex with someone besides her before marriage;-)

But seriously this is something that Facebook, Google, Twitter and others have brought upon themselves. Or at least accelerated the movement towards by not building privacy into their products.

And the people who have screamed about misinformation destroying our democracies and arguing for restrictions on privacy and free speech are also to blame. They are supporting a move towards totalitarianism that will haunt our societies in the coming decades unless we stop it.

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[junglee_iitk]

Move towards totalitarianism is the intended goal, all the other drama is window dressing, like an NGO which takes foreign funding to pay its ceo.

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[Craefter]

I totally agree. The hypocrisy is so brazen that it isn't funny anymore. Facebook suing a government because they themselves want to be be the sole arbiters of free speech. They themselves stifle the speech of opponents of the (US) government.

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[junglee_iitk]

While I agree that Facebook is hypocritical, I am much more concerned that government wants the ability to snoop on the private communication of its citizens.

They can complain about terrorists all they want, but let us be clear, it will be used to stifle opposing voices and people will be forced to be part of political machinery to safeguard themselves. Most people won't do it, and most people will just be stifled.

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[Craefter]

I will eat my shoe if you can show me an agenda item of any government called: "How can we give ourselves LESS power."

The parent poster already stated that Facebook, Google and Twitter eroded the "holy" concept of privacy. Nowadays you are suspicious if you DON'T have a Facebook account and apply for a job. Governments are just exploiting the opportunity. Personally I find it quite sad that the "elected" government does not trust its constituents to have thoughts of their own.

And the real terrorists? At max

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[junglee_iitk]

So true. Forget about terrorist I have already kind of switched to signal. I see tor as the only hope. I am sure running tor nodes is the next list of things to be banned, whenever that happens.

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[HiThere]

The thing is, "misinformation destroying our democracies" *is* a serious problem. What to do about it isn't at all clear. Lots of people demand a "quick and obvious solution", even if it just makes things worse.

I don't really have any good idea about how to deal with the problem, though. Even before the internet destructive gossip was a serious problem, and the internet let it spread in an unbridled fashion. But it's destructive enough that I understand when lots of folks jump on the "easy, quick, simpl

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[jlar]

The thing is, "misinformation destroying our democracies" *is* a serious problem.

Sure it is, and it has always been a serious problem for democracies. Social networks have of course disrupted the information flows making the spread of both truthful and false information faster. But the best antidote to false information is still truthful information even though as Churchill said: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." Even Thomas Jefferson used misinformation to get elected. But I agree that we are currently in a state where we need more

The real problem...

[YuppieScum]

...is that a lot of the "misinformation" is coming from governments themselves, either directly or through cut-outs and nominees ("tame" journalists, for example), and directed at both their own populations and/or those of political/ideological "competitors".

Further, a lot of the claimed "misinformation" many governments wish to suppress is actually either discourse by their political opposition or the "fact-checking" of their statements.

Combine that with the gullibility - and, in some cases, outright

Whose constitution is that?

[I've Got Three Cats]

... violated citizens' constitutional right to privacy

I'm not defending India's move to do this, but if this law was passed and didn't break India's constitution, then what standing does Facebook think they have telling another country what privacy means?

Maybe India should sue Facebook for enabling the misinformation crisis and then profiting off it.

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[znrt]

if this law was passed and didn't break India's constitution, then what standing does Facebook think they have telling another country what privacy means?

that only means that nobody in india has bothered to challenge that law in their constitutional courts yet. this happens all the time and constitutional courts can become just another domain of lawfare. facebook has the same right to play that game as everyone else.

Mass Communication breakthroughs

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Every time there is a break through in mass communication, the established order gets upset. Sometimes with catastrophic consequences.

Printing press was the first one. For 100 years or more before Martin Luther, many were protesting the excesses and corruption of the Roman Catholic church. The 96 thesis of Martin Luther were nailed to the church door, but also mailed to hundreds of other clergymen creating a mass movement, leading to the schism.

Before the invention of telegraph, a bond trader from New York, (could be Vanderbilt) bought bonds of a large company that went bankrupt for pennies on the dollar, sailed down the Atlantic coast. Dock in a port, sell the bonds before news arrives on horseback and sail south to repeat the process. Newspapers published the sailing of troop ships without realizing telegraph will take the news to enemy before the troops arrived in the Crimean Peninsula! Sort of Saddam Hussein getting early warning of bombers taking off from aircraft carriers through CNN or Mumbai hotel terrorists monitoring movement of police via television reports!

Then came radio, allowing heads of states to talk directly to the masses. FDR and Churchill on the allied side and Hitler and Mussolini on the axis side.

Television, with just three networks in USA forced the politicians to speak the same message simultaneously to their party and the opposition. Newscasters became extremely powerful. Forced politicians to invent dog whistles and spin.

And so on it goes, with smart phones and disinformation. Till the population develops natural resistance to disinformation campaigns, we can expect turmoil.

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[Ol Olsoc]

And so on it goes, with smart phones and disinformation. Till the population develops natural resistance to disinformation campaigns, we can expect turmoil.

This should be +5 insightful. The concept of the internet and social media as a virus that humanity must develop immunity against is a really good one. As a person who has been there early on, I simply distrust anything I see that is one-off. I'm not perfect, but I'm largely immune

My Brother-in-law was over yesterday, and he was parroting far right wing BS - he was showing symptoms of being infected, and I could even tell where he'd been picking up the illness. It isn't a Right Wing only illness, there ar

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[GillBates0]

False, anti India propaganda. Indian culture based on Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world, 5000 years old, and highly inclusivist/pluralistic in nature. What the BJP, RSS and other Hindu organizations work against, is fundamentalist Islamists (and some Christians) who exploite this intrinsically tolerant culture to forcefully convert Hindus to their less tolerant religions.

How Germans Distorted Hindu Ideas Which Led to Nazism:
https://youtu.be/VJZ4LARPMJU [youtu.be]

The exploitation of Hindus is a classic e

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[alexgieg]

Hinduism is the oldest religion in the world, 5000 years old

The oldest religion in the world is Altjira, the religion of the Native Australian aboriginal population, popularly but incorrectly known as Dreamtime. Altjira is at least 12 times older than Hinduism. This is confirmed by geological records, as some songs and stories refer to events that happened about 60,000 years ago that were personally witnessed by the ancestors of the singers and passed down from father to son for over 3,000 generations.

Now, granted, Hinduism is much more philosophically complex than

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[GillBates0]

That's a noble goal if and only if you don't believe the Hindu gods to be real. If they're real, they need no human defenders to "protect" them from the "menace" of a child-like deity such as Lord Jahveh. Can one even think such a thing? Lord Brahma, Lord Shiva, Lord Indra, Lord Ganesha, Lady Lakshmi, Lady Kali, or any of the others, "worried" about Lord Jahveh's worshipers incursions in their land "threatening" it, and thus "depending" on the BJP to "save" the Vedas from the "risk"? Nah, this is silly to the extreme! If the possibility of Sanathana Dharma going down ever posited itself, the very next moment, with but a gesture, They'd see it restored to its full glory. There's absolutely no need for BJP and RSS "saviors" to do help Them in this, at all.

The problem is not protecting the deities (they need no protection, plus Hinduism is pluralistic in that, it says, different religions and names of God are, but different paths to the same goal: from the Rgveda).

It is more about defending this tolerant culture from intolerance and world dominating political ideologies associated mainly with Islam (non-believers are chastised as infidels) but also with Christianity. And also the fact that conversion by force is not uncommon.

Example from further up in the t

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[GillBates0]

I also noticed that the author of the article you linked to is a Pakistani Muslim, a demographic notorious for anti Hindu and anti India violence and propaganda.

Big tech

[kaatochacha]

To India: "We're a bastion to democracy! stop that!"
To China: "Which encryption keys do you want, exactly? Here's all of them, just in case. Plus, there is only one China, and Taiwan is part of it".