According to personal data protection specialists, the Indian authorities have requested the popular messaging service WhatsApp to digitally fingerprint messages sent through the platform without violating encryption, as this way messages would be traceable, which would facilitate some government intelligence.
The Indian government believes that WhatsApp
should have the ability to identify the source of a specific message, the
number of people who have received it, and the number of times it has been
forwarded, all without having to access the message content. For the Indian
government, tracking a message from this platform has become a priority after a
series of fake news about kidnaps caused multiple lynching in different
territories.
“Our intention is not to read user
messages, we only intend to trace the origin of messages forwarded to multiple
users that generate this kind of confusion”, said one Indian government
official. India is one of the main markets for WhatsApp, with more than 300
million registered active users
For a long time, law enforcement agencies in
various countries have been in favor of such measures, arguing that metadata
(username, number of participants in a group chat, etc.) is not sufficient
information for intelligence tasks.
However, according to personal data protection
specialists, WhatsApp end-to-end encryption
does not allow messages to be tracked without being read, making it impossible
to track a message without breaking encryption, which consists of a violation
of the user’s privacy.
The messaging service, owned by Facebook, does
not store data about user messages, but according to the personal data protection
experts from the International Institute of Cyber Security (IICS), if accessing
requests from India, WhatsApp should restructure its architecture. The main
drawback is the coup against user privacy, if WhatsApp did this in India,
surely other governments would send similar requests to the company, which
could lead to a scenario of espionage and mass surveillance against anyone.
