Govt asks WhatsApp to fingerprint messages for traceability: Report

The government has asked Facebook-owned WhatsApp to digitally fingerprint messages shared on the platform to aid traceability, according to a report by The Economic Times. The government wants WhatsApp to be able to trace the origins of messages, without breaking encryption, and find out how many people read and forwarded it. “We don’t want to read messages. But, when we see a problematic message, WhatsApp should be able to help us trace the sender,” the official added. Moneycontrol could not independently verify the story. India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with over 200 million users. Misinformation shared on the platform led to child kidnappings and lynchings in 2018. WhatsApp declined a request for comment by The Economic Times. Over the past few months, WhatsApp officials have resisted the Indian government’s demands to break end-to-end encryption of messages. They say that doing so would change the architecture of the platform and make it a different product. WhatsApp introduced encryption in 2016 to improve privacy and, currently, does not store data of the content shared on the platform. Law enforcement officials have said that the metadata (name, display image and number of people on chat groups) is not sufficient to track the senders, the report said. Draft amendments to the Information Technology Act, recommended in December 2018, stipulate that internet companies should be able to trace the origins of content shared on the platforms. The government will ask for the origins of messages only in certain cases, an official told The Economic Times, “We will try to limit requests. There will be minimum touch-points so there aren’t thousands of people sending traceability requests to WhatsApp,” the official said. Source: Money Control