Is WhatsApp planning to leave India? No, but it is concerned about government demands

If today morning you woke up to the headlines screaming that WhatsApp was going to leave India because of some government demands, rest easy. It's not happening. For better or worse, probably better, WhatsApp is staying put. It does have some concerns about the kind of accountability that the Indian government has demanded from it, and it still doesn't deny it won't pull out of India, but for now you can keep using WhatsApp.

The headlines that you read today morning are apparently based on some wrong inference that was taken from a few statements that Carl Woog, WhatsApp's Head of Communications, gave news agency IANS. However, Woog apparently never said -- and on this we are going by the statement attributed to Woog in the news story -- that WhatsApp will leave, or is planning to leave, India. Instead, this was what he said when he was asked if WhatsApp would quit India when forced to break encryption in the app:

"The proposed changes are going overboard and are not consistent with strong privacy protections that people around the world are seeking... Given the end-to-end encryption we have in place, the regulations will require us to re-architect our product. It will not help to speculate what is to come. There is a process in place in India to discuss this issue."

So basically, he doesn't say that WhatsApp will leave India. The problem was that Woog didn't categorically denied pulling out of India, and that probably fuelled the impression that WhatsApp might leave India.

Having said that, of late the relations between the Indian government and WhatsApp have not been entirely cordially. WhatsApp is popular in India but with over 200 million people using it, this is also an app that many are using for illegal activities at worst, like sharing child pornography, and spreading misinformation and spam at best. The problems with it are serious and Indian government, as well as local law enforcement agencies, claim that the apps security features make it nearly impossible to catch or trace people who carry out illegal activities through WhatsApp.

The government has a point. And it wants WhatsApp to bring in a feature that will let law agencies or even trace a WhatsApp message to original sender. The government says that this sort of feature can be added to the app without weakening the end-to-end encryption. The government has, for now, highlighted that it does not want to ability to read or peer into people's message. It only wants traceability.

WhatsApp has resisted. It says that building traceability will break end-to-end encryption. "Of the proposed regulations, the one which concerns us the most is the emphasis on traceability of messages," said Woog. So yes, WhatsApp is concerned about the Indian government demands, but no it's leaving India.