On Monday, the honorable Supreme Court of India issued notices to the social media giant Facebook and the messaging application WhatsApp. The subject is the new privacy policy; the companies are trying to apply for the Indian users.
A Bench, headed by CJI SA Bobde, noted to the companies that users’ privacy must be protected and not be shared with the other companies. The new privacy policy in the queue is lower in standard than the policies applied to different continents like Europe. The Bench also asked the companies to respond within the next four weeks.
The senior advocate Shyam Divan highlighted that WhatsApp is differentiating between India and Europe’s users in terms of privacy standards. However, the messaging app authority already denied this allegation. Mr. Divan also alleged that WhatsApp already sold a huge amount of metadata to third parties.
You probably know that WhatsApp has already declared a delay of three months to impose its new privacy policy for the Indian users. Earlier, it was scheduled to become active on 8th February. A noticeable percentage of Indian users shifted to other alternatives like Telegram and Signal after the new privacy policy announcement.
From the company side, senior advocate Kapil Sibal said that Europe has their General Data Protection Regulations, where Indian doesn’t. “We will follow the law if Parliament makes it,”
The CJI said, “We are telling you what we heard and read. People think that if A sends a message to B and B to C, the circuit of messages is revealed to Facebook,”
