WhatsApp encryption tweaks may land it in hot water in India

Photo credit: sandeepachetan.

If you’ve used WhatsApp at all in the past few days, you probably noticed a message about its new encryption rules. It now encrypts its messages with a 256-bit key, which means that only those that you’ve involved in your chat can see the photos, videos, and files that you send them.

“No one can see inside that message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes. Not even us,” WhatsApp’s co-founders explained in a blog post.

As a few keen-eyed media sites spotted, however, this goes against India’s encryption laws.

According to the License Agreement for Provision of Internet Service, which is a mandate issued by the Department of Telecommunications in 2007, private companies can only encrypt up to 40 bits. If they want to go any higher, they have to ask the government.

And yet, this law only explicitly mentions internet providers, which WhatsApp technically is not. There may still be a loophole for WhatsApp to exist in, and loopholes have worked well for tech companies in India.

See: How to operate an illegal startup under the radar

In the meantime, the Indian government posted a draft of a new National Encryption Policy online on September 21, 2015. The draft explained that, while encryption for storage and communication issues is allowed, everything is fair game when the government wants to access information. This is to make sure that technology is not used for “anti-national elements.” It has not been passed yet, and it’s not clear whether this new law will explicitly include messaging apps like WhatsApp.

In Brazil, WhatsApp was blocked for 48 hours in December last year. While no official statements were released, the assumption was that the messaging service got on the government’s bad side when it refused to release information about a person suspected to be involved with Brazil’s largest criminal group, the Primeiro Comando da Capital.

“The desire to protect people’s private communication is one of the core beliefs we have at WhatsApp, and for me, it’s personal,” WhatsApp CEO and co-founder Jan Koum noted. “I grew up in the USSR during communist rule and the fact that people couldn’t speak freely is one of the reasons my family moved to the United States.”

Too big to stop

WhatsApp crossed 1 billion users globally in February 2016. In a statement, it said that Indians sent the most number of photos over WhatsApp and had the second highest number of groups. It also removed its ambiguous US$1 subscription fee. It’s the most-used messaging app in the country, with 56 percent of those who are messaging online reportedly using it.

Indians are doing more than just chatting casually via the app. There have been reports of farmers deciding what to grow and where to sell using WhatsApp, and the anecdote of housewives using WhatsApp to interact with their local grocers is a common one.