WhatsApp's Fight With India Could Have Global Repercussions

The country's "traceability" requirement would undermine the privacy of the encrypted messaging app's users far beyond its borders. WhatsApp is fighting for the privacy of citizens of the world's largest democracy. This week, the Facebook-owned messaging platform sued the Indian government in a bid to challenge new IT rules that ask messaging apps to trace the "first originator" of a message. Doing so could require WhatsApp to weaken its end-to-end encryption, revealing identities of the sender and potentially affecting the security of not only its more than 400 million users in India, but potentially billions of others worldwide.