WhatsApp has challenged Information Technology Rule 4(2) of the 2021 IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code), which mandates ‘significant social media intermediaries’ to ‘enable the identification of the first originator of the information’, which may be required by a court order or other competent authority
The HC was hearing a petition by WhatsApp and its parent company Meta (formerly known as Facebook), challenging India’s 2021 IT Rules for social media intermediaries requiring the app to trace chats and make provisions to identify the original source of the information.
End-to-end encryption provides strong protection for keeping your communications private, but not every messaging app uses it, and even some of the ones that do don’t have it turned on by default.