Traceability not essential for WhatsApp: Tamil Nadu Advocate General

In the latest development in the Madras High Court case on WhatsApp traceability, the state’s advocate general has told news portal Medianama that end-to-End encryption for WhatsApp is not essential and was a business decision.“End-to-end encryption was introduced to WhatsApp later. Therefore, it is not essential to the platform. It was a business decision. It is a question of business policy versus law”, E Manoharan, the Additional Government Pleader for the Tamil Nadu government was quoted to be saying.

The Tamil Nadu government is currently demanding traceability of messages from the private messaging app. The TN government’s current stance is for WhatsApp to provide some traceability on its messages, while storing the data with itself.

The Madras High Court has been hearing the case for a while now, which falls amidst the central government’s efforts to gain traceability on WhatsApp. Last week it had also shot down a proposal linking Aadhaar with social media accounts to curb fake news and improve law enforcement.

While these comments were made outside of court, it is enough to give a rude wake up call to privacy activists across the world to renew their efforts. Whatsapp’s end-to-end encryption secures users from any unauthorized, third-party access to their messages.