The country warned Mark Zuckerberg‘s firm not to train its AI models on users’ personal data, and now the social media giant is pressing pause on the tools in the market until they can come to a solution, Reuters reports.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp recently vowed to pull out of India if it is told to stop end-to-end encryption.
The Meta-owned messaging service would have no choice but to leave the market if the country wants them to stop scrambling data to ensure that only those with the decryption key can gain access, WhatsApp told the Delhi High Court in its legal battle against the Union of India.
“As a platform, we are saying, if we are told to break encryption, then WhatsApp goes,” WhatsApp’s Tejas Karia told a Division Bench in New Delhi.
“There is no such rule anywhere else in the world, not even Brazil,” Karia contended. “We will have to keep a complete chain, and we don’t know which messages will be asked to be decrypted. It means millions and millions of messages will have to be stored for a number of years.”
Meta contested a rule in the country’s Information Technology Rules 2021, which states that messaging services must reveal who sent a message if ordered to do so by a court or authority.
“A significant social media intermediary providing services primarily in the nature of messaging shall enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource,” the rule read, “as may be required by a judicial order passed by a court of competent jurisdiction or an order passed under section 69 by the Competent Authority, as per the Information Technology [Procedure and Safeguards for interception, monitoring and decryption of information] Rules, 2009.”
