Indian Govt planning to frame privacy policy for WhatsApp and Facebook

In a bid to protect personal information and curb sharing of individual data, the Indian government is planning to frame a privacy policy for instant messaging services like WhatsApp, Facebook.

The government’s top law officer attorney general Mukul Rohatgi informed a five-judge bench headed by Justice Dipak Misra hearing to decide whether instant messaging service WhatsApp’s user data sharing policy violated citizens’ right to privacy said that “the government is actively mulling over a comprehensive data-protection framework. We are considering all aspects of data protection including the right to be forgotten.”

The case is an appeal against last year’s ruling of the Delhi High Court allowing Facebook-owned WhatsApp to enforce its new privacy policy.

A petition filed before the Supreme Court had claimed that there is no protection of data on Facebook and WhatsApp. As per the petitioner, there are 157 million users on WhatsApp and Facebook. Therefore the service provided by the social network and messaging app should be considered as a public utility service.

However, the instant messaging platform had said that its new privacy policy does not infringe on the privacy of users and no third party can read the messages due to its end-to-end encryption. When a user deletes his or her WhatsApp account, the information is no longer retained on its servers, the company had claimed before the Delhi High Court.