A SOCIO-LEGAL ANALYSIS OF NEW WHATSAPP PRIVACY POLICY, 2021 IN INDIA
By Anukriti Dubey
In recent times one can observe that how a large number of social networking companies have indoctrinated predisposition against the privacy of their users by not giving enough power to users to control their privacy settings, default settings, data retention or by amending privacy policies. The users are faced with threats of data aggregation and the social networking companies are turning blind eye to these issues, and champions of such misuse of data and abuse of power especially in India is being done by Facebook and WhatsApp. On February 8th ,2021 a new WhatsApp Privacy Policy was announced that held that the app users have to agree on its new privacy policy to continue using the application and if not, the user will not be able to use the application. This policy caused a major backlash from public as it raised serious concerns regarding violation of right to privacy. In this paper we are analysing the violations of right to privacy is being done through this policy and the issues arising out of the policy, the differential treatment that is done between European and Indian users, what are the data protection regulations in India and what role our judiciary is playing in protecting data rights of people, where the Indian Government is lacking in protecting data privacy of people and what can be possible solutions to safeguard it.
Keywords: WhatsApp Privacy Policy, Indian Government, Data Protection, Data Aggregation, Right to Privacy.
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