HC pings IIT-M professor for report on WhatsApp's traceability

BENGALURU: The Madras High Court has sought a technical report on how to enable traceability of messages on social media platform WhatsApp.

The court on Wednesday asked V Kamakoti, a professor at IIT Madras who is also a member of the National Security Advisory Board, to file the report. Kamakoti advises the Prime Minister’s Office on security matters. He is assisting the court in a hearing of two writ petitions filed in July last year that had sought interlinking of the Aadhaar database with social media profiles for authentication of identity.

The division bench of the Madras High Court, comprising Justices S Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad, has since expanded the scope of the public interest litigations to include issues including curbing cybercrime and intermediary liability within the ambit of the legal proceedings.


The case is likely to impact WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging platform owned by Facebook, as it has consistently resisted the government’s attempts to enable traceability to help law enforcers catch perpetrators of misinformation and rumours on the platform. WhatsApp sees traceability as a violation of user privacy.

India is the largest market for WhatsApp, with 350-400 million people using the messaging application.

WhatsApp declined to comment, while messages sent to Kamakoti did not elicit a response until the time of going to press.

During oral arguments based on submissions made by the lawyers for the social media platforms, the court said it may even examine the existing level of compliance and legal vacuum under the IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules.

WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Twitter, the central and Tamil Nadu governments are all parties to the case. Last month, the court allowed digital rights organisation, Internet Freedom Foundation, to act as an intervener in the case.

Kamakoti proposed in June that WhatsApp could include the phone number of the originator of a message whenever the message is forwarded. This, he said, would not require WhatsApp to read the messages at any stage, thus keeping its encryption in place and avoiding violation of privacy rights.

The next hearing in the case is scheduled for August 21-22.

Senior advocates Kapil Sibal and Arvind Datar are representing WhatsApp and Facebook in the case. They have argued that the court should wait for the government to pass a data protection law and amend intermediary rules.

The government has been insisting that WhatsApp allow messages to be traced to source, especially after rumours floating on the platform led to a spate of lynchings in 2018.

The US company has pushed back, saying it would infringe on the privacy of users, and the company will have to change its entire architecture to embed elements to trace messages. ET reported in June that the government had asked WhatsApp to start digitally fingerprinting each of its messages to enable traceability.