WhatsApp and Its Privacy Policy in India

 

In today’s ever-changing world where the age-old conventional technology has been defenestrated every day, data proved to be the most important thing and usually termed as “oil” or “air” of our society.

In celebrated case Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs. Union of India, 2017, the right of privacy has been accepted by Hon’ble Supreme Court of India as one of our fundamental right and observed privacy as a part of right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the constitution of India. So, privacy is a fundamental right protected under the Indian constitution.

As per the report of Press Information Bureau Government of India, India has approximately 53 Crore WhatsApp users. We Indian have whole-heartedly welcome end-to-end encryption providing instant messenger WhatsApp, especially for its promised privacy system.

WhatsApp was bought by Facebook in 2014 and in 2016 WhatsApp introduced its changed Privacy policy and challenging the same a case was filed before the Hon’ble Delhi High Court being Karmanya Singh Sareen And Anr vs Union Of India And Ors, wherein as per order dated 23 September, 2016, Hon’ble Delhi High Court passed following order,

“we consider it appropriate to issue the following directions to protect the interest of the users of "WhatsApp":

i) If the users opt for completely deleting "WhatsApp" account before 25.09.2016, the information/data/details of such users should be deleted completely from "WhatsApp" servers and the same shall not be shared with the "Facebook" or any one of its group companies.

ii) So far as the users who opt to remain in "WhatsApp" are concerned, the existing information/data/details of such users upto 25.09.2016 shall not be shared with "Facebook" or any one of its group companies.

iii) The respondent Nos.1 and 5 shall consider the issues regarding the functioning of the Internet Messaging Applications like "WhatsApp" and take an appropriate decision at the earliest as to whether it is feasible to bring the same under the statutory regulatory framework.”

Again, the WhatsApp has introduced another Privacy policy and previously the last date was 28 February 2021 which was later in lieu of large scale protest extended to 15 May 2021. Meanwhile one application was filed before the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India challenging the privacy policy to be introduced by WhatsApp which is still pending.

The Reason of Objection:
India does not have any privacy law like that of GDPR of European Union, California Consumer Privacy Act of USA and Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados (or LGPD) of Brazil, hence the Indian people are more vulnerable to the said policy.

Our Government has introduced the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 as per Justice B.N. Srikrishna Committee draft which is pending before the Standing Committee.

The trillion-dollar company Facebook through its WhatsApp has in his new Privacy policy wanted to collect the following types of secured, personal and private data of Indian Users:

 
👉Information You Provide
👉Your Account Information:
👉your mobile phone number and basic information (including a profile name of your choice)
👉Your Messages

• Undelivered Messages up to 30 days
• Media Forwarding

👉 Your Connections

👉 Status Information

👉 Transactions and Payments Data

👉 Customer Support and Other Communication

👉 Automatically Collected Information

👉 Usage and Log Information

👉 Device and Connection Information

👉 Location Information.

👉 Cookies.

👉 Your phone number, profile name and photo, "about" information, last seen information, and message receipts

For further reading details can be available at 👇

https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/updates/privacy-policy?eea=0#privacy-policy-updates-information-we-collect

 
If We Do Not Accept the New Privacy Policy of WhatsApp:
If we do not accept the new policy, we shall have limited functionality in our WhatsApp account after May 15, 2021.