The Supreme Court has refused to ban WhatsApp and has asked the petitioner to approach the government.
A petition had been filed in the Supreme Court seeking a ban on WhatsApp. The petition said that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption poses a security threat to the country.
The petition, filed by RTI activist Sudhir Yadav, said WhatsApp and other messenger services violate provisions of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, and Information Technology Act, 2000.
California-based WhatsApp, acquired by Facebook Inc in February 2014, introduced end-to-end encryption on April 5, 2016, to its billions of users with an updated version of the application. In cryptography, encryption is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorised parties can read it.
From April, every message in WhatsApp uses 256-bit encryption. WhatsApp servers do not have access to the private keys of the users…which means it would be impossible to decrypt messages, chats, calls, videos, images and documents, Yadav said. The Gurugram-based petitioner claimed this posed a serious threat to national security as terrorists can plan attacks.
Thankfully, the court threw it out.
