WhatsApp has filed a legal complaint in Delhi against the Indian government seeking to block regulations coming into force on Wednesday that experts say would compel the California-based Facebook unit to break privacy protections, sources said.

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The lawsuit, described to Reuters by people who know her, asks Delhi’s High Court to rule that one of the new rules violates privacy rights in India’s constitution because it obliges social media companies to identify the “first author of the information” when the authorities so require.

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The Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 were announced by the Centre on February 25, 2021, to regulate social media platforms by imposing a code of ethics and mandating a three-tier grievance redressal framework. One of the new laws gives the authorities the power to ask the companies to identify and reveal those accused of wrongdoing on their platform, but WhatsApp says it’s practically not possible without compromising user privacy.

While the law requires WhatsApp to unmask only people credibly accused of wrongdoing, the company says it cannot do that alone in practice. Because messages are end-to-end encrypted, to comply with the law WhatsApp says it would have break encryption for receivers, as well as “originators”, of messages.

The tussle between the Indian government and tech giants is getting fierce

The new laws have escalated the tension between the BJP-led Indian government and the social media giants. Majorly because the time allowed to comply with the new laws is considered to be “too less” by these companies and there are a lot of missing details in the new set of rules.

The response of the companies to the new rules has been a subject of intense speculation since they were unveiled in February, 90 days before they were slated to go into effect.

The Guidelines for Intermediaries and the Code of Ethics for Digital Media, promulgated by the Ministry of Information Technology, designate “significant social media intermediaries” as being at risk of losing their protection from prosecution and criminal prosecution. they are breaking the code.

WhatsApp, its parent Facebook, and its tech rivals have all invested heavily in India. But company officials privately fear that increasingly heavy regulation by the Modi government could jeopardize those prospects.