Mahua Moitra bats for privacy, approaches Madras HC in social media traceability case

The Madras HC is hearing a case on the scope of traceability of messages in WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

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Member of Parliament and member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology Mahua Moitra has sought to be impleaded as a respondent in the WhatsApp traceability case. Mahua has been asked to be impleaded in a case that the Madras High Court is hearing that is looking at the traceability of messages on social media.

This came after two petitions were filed in the Madras High Court for linking Aadhaar to social media accounts. While the HC said that Aadhaar would not be linked, it expanded the scope of the petitions to look at traceability of messages and subsequently, WhatsApp, Google, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter were impleaded in the case. Similar petitions to link Aadhaar were filed in the Bombay and Madhya Pradesh High Courts. Following this, Facebook filed a transfer petition in the Supreme Court to avoid the possibility of conflicting decisions from the High Courts. The Supreme Court is presently hearing this transfer petition and has directed the Madras High Court not to pass any final order.

Mahua has filed her petition in the Madras High Court. In her petition seeking to be impleaded, she said that the case was moving toward the abrogation of individual privacy rights. She said that this was through proposals “that serve to undermine the end-to-end encryption of online communication and increase traceability of users on online platforms like WhatsApp, Twitter etc.”

The Madras High Court had asked IIT Madras Professor V Kamakoti to submit a report on the feasibility of messages on WhatsApp being traced. In late July, he informed the court that it was possible to trace the original sender of messages on social media platforms, including Facebook and WhatsApp. Mahua also took objection to this and said that the proposal has serious defects from a privacy standpoint.

“Technically skilled persons will always be able to use simple workarounds to mask their own phone numbers, or instead link messages to someone else's number; technically unskilled individuals and laypersons would also be made more vulnerable by having their contact information exposed, thereby further eroding online safety and privacy norms,” the MP said.

She further added that creating such access to encrypted data would undermine the privacy of WhatsApp and could lead to potential hacking.

In her petition, she said that digital privacy must remain sacrosanct as many do not know the harmful effects of online invasions of privacy. "The linking, indexing and permanent association of such communication to their identities would amount to a serious invasion of their expectation or privacy in the private spheres of their life, and have a significant chilling effect on the usage of any technology by Indian citizens,” she said.

She raised the citizen’s right to privacy to point out the social media companies have a lot of information about individuals, and that any decision about the online privacy of individuals must be viewed “through the lens of right to privacy”.