TLI Staff
New Delhi: Highlighting the differential privacy policy of messaging giant WhatsApp in European countries and India, Delhi-based traders’ group has urged the government to rein in big technology companies and frame policies for protecting privacy of citizens.
The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) has also filed a petition in the Supreme Court with the prayer to direct WhatsApp to withdraw its new privacy policy. It has claimed that the new privacy policy of Facebook-owned WhatsApp encroaches upon various fundamental rights of the citizens granted by Constitution of India.
The petition filed in the Apex court has highlights the difference of approach in EU and India countries with respect to the privacy policy of WhatsApp and how the data of Indian users can be misused by such big tech companies.
The petition has been drafted by Advocate Abir Roy and settled and filed in the Court by Advocate on Record Vivek Narayan Sharma.
CAIT National President BC Bhartia and Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal have alleged that WhatsApp has adopted the approach of ‘my way or high way’ which is arbitrary, unjustified, and unconstitutional and cannot be accepted in a democratic Country like India.
“WhatsApp has been fraudulently collecting personal user data. At the time of its launch, WhatsApp attracted users based on the promise of non-sharing of user data and strong privacy principles. In 2014, after the acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook, when the users had started doubting the privacy of their data and were in fear that their personal data will be shared with Facebook, WhatsApp promised that nothing would change in the privacy policy after the acquisition,” the CAIT top office bearers said in a statement.
They further said that WhatsApp in August 2016 retracted from it and introduced a new Privacy Policy which severely compromised the rights of its users and made the Privacy rights of users completely vulnerable.
“Under the new privacy policy, it allowed the sharing of personal data with Facebook and all its group companies for commercial advertising and marketing. Since then, the company has been altering its policies to collect and process a wider range of information, and share the same with the third party applications,” CAIT has alleged.
WhatsApp has, however, dismissed the allegations and concerns around its privacy policy maintaining that it will continue to protect private messages with end-to-end encryption.
“Our privacy policy update does not affect the privacy of your messages with friends or family,” WhatsApp said in a post of Twitter.
In the last few weeks, there has been massive public uproar against the proposed privacy policy of instant messaging platform WhatsApp. The users had received the new policy and were asked to agree to it. Concerned over privacy issues, many users switched over to rival instant messaging app Signal while majority of them raised red flag to the new policy.