The Supreme Court of India has set aside the petition seeking the direct interference of the centre to ban WhatsApp as the app does not comply with the new Information and Technology rules of India.

A bench of Justices MM Sundresh and Aravind Kumar dismissed the plea filed by a software engineer, Omanakuttan KG. Earlier Omanakuttan had moved to the Kerala High Court seeking the same plea- a ban on Whatsapp as doesn’t abide by the IT rules, 2021.

In June 2021 the High Court dismissed the plea calling it ‘premature’ after which the petitioner moved to the top court. According to KG, there are high chances of data manipulation by the user end as it is not feasible to trace the origin of a message that is being circulated on the app. Therefore it increases the volatility of the circulation of fake messages which can have serious consequences.

Apart from this, the updated privacy policy of the app mentions that the app has access to store and use the personal data of its users including the battery percentage in their devices which is a great violation of the right to privacy.

The petition also states that the app has a separate privacy policy in Europe which complies with their laws but it defies to comply with the laws of India.

What does WhatsApp privacy policy say

WhatsApp’s privacy policy says that it doesn’t typically store messages of users on its servers once they are delivered. However, if a message remains undelivered, it may store it temporarily. Besides this when users forward media files like photos and videos WhatsApp might briefly store them for delivery purposes. This means the app only stores data in certain situations, not all the time.

WhatsApp collects user data like profile pictures, billing info, and metadata (like your operating system, language, and IP address), and shares some of it with Facebook. However, because of end-to-end encryption, it cannot read user's messages or trace their content. So, while it can access things like your contacts and other data, it cannot see the actual message content.