India wants to track user messages to fight crime

Feb 13, 2019 10:20 GMT  ·  By

Facebook is under pressure once again in India, as the local government wants the company to provide a way to access private messages in an attempt to fight crime.

Gopalakrishnan S., a senior official in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told Bloomberg that services like WhatsApp, which the US-based social media giant owns, are being used for criminal activities like spreading child abuse content, and the only way to stop this from happening is to provide law enforcement with access to messages.

“We don’t care about the good morning and divorce messages that are shared, we only want traceability to prevent or detect crimes,” he said.

Messages on WhatsApp are encrypted by default, which means they cannot be accessed by a third-party.

Facebook has already refused to provide a method for accessing private messages, with a WhatsApp spokesperson pointing out that such an approach would be against the concept that powers the messaging service in the first place.

“What is contemplated by the rules is not possible today given the end-to-end encryption that we provide and it would require us to re-architect WhatsApp, leading us to a different product, one that would not be fundamentally private,” WhatsApp spokesman Carl Woog explained.

Facebook to enable default encryption on more services

While India believes that the only way to stop criminals is to track user conversations on WhatsApp, the social media company says it has a fight on its own against illegal activities on its platform. No less than 250,000 accounts are banned each month on WhatsApp, just because they share illegal content. The firm, however, hasn’t revealed how it detects the infringing messages.

“We ban users from WhatsApp if we become aware they are sharing content that exploits or endangers children,” Woog explained.

Gopalakrishnan warns that services like WhatsApp allow criminals to share contact without being caught.

“For six months, we’ve been telling them to bring more accountability to their platform but what have they done? So pedophiles can go about on WhatsApp fully secure that they won’t get caught. It is absolutely evil,” he said.

Other services, including Twitter, could be targeted by new rules proposed by the Indian officials and requesting Internet companies to provide access to private conversations. In the meantime, Facebook is working on adding default encryption on messages sent on Messenger and Instagram.