WhatsApp filed a legal complaint against the Indian Government: Current Affairs Special Series

Team Adda247 and BankersAdda are here with a Current Affairs Special Series. In this series, candidates will be introduced to current affairs topics daily, which will not only improve their general awareness but also will ensure that the candidates do not lack in any current affairs topic. Today’s Current Affairs topic is WhatsApp filed a legal complaint against the Indian Government.

WhatsApp filed a legal complaint against the Indian Government

WhatsApp sues the Indian government in New Delhi seeking to block new IT regulations coming into force in recent times. WhatsApp says new IT rules will end privacy.

WhatsApp has bagged to Delhi High Court to announce that one of the new rules is a violation of privacy rights in India’s constitution since it requires social media companies to identify the “first originator of information” when authorities would demanding for it. While the law requires WhatsApp to expose only people credibly accused of wrongdoing, the company say it cannot do that alone in practice. WhatsApp said that it would have break encryption for receivers, as well as “originators”, of messages because messages are end-to-end encrypted. 

The lawsuit shoots up a growing struggle between the Indian Government and tech giants including Facebook, Google, and its parent Alphabet and Twitter in one of their key global growth markets. Tensions accelerated after a police visit to twitter’s offices recently. The micro-blogging service has labelled posts by a spokesman for the dominant party and others as containing “manipulated media”.

The intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code, implemented by the ministry of information technology, designates “significant social media intermediaries” as standing to lose protection from lawsuits and criminal prosecution if they failed to hold to the code. Tech giants like WhatsApp, its patent facebook, and other global companies have invested heavily in India, but now they all are worried about increasingly heavy-handed regulation by the Modi Government could jeopardize those growth prospects. 

In New Rules: Big social media firms would be required to appoint Indian citizens to key compliance roles, remove content within 36 hours of a legal order, and set up a mechanism to respond to complaints. They must also implement automated processes to take down pornography.