Help Article | What is traceability and why does WhatsApp oppose it?
Moreover, traceability inverts the way law enforcement typically investigates crimes. In a typical law enforcement request, a government requests technology companies provide account information about a known individual’s account. With traceability, a government would provide a technology company a piece of content and ask who sent it first.
- Mozilla: “The open internet is fundamentally based on the principles of interoperability and common standards, which may begin to fragment under these rules. Some provisions, such as those enabling traceability of encrypted content and automated filtering, are fundamentally incompatible with end-to-end encryption and will weaken protections that millions of users have come to rely on in their daily lives.”
- Access Now: “The mandates in the new [Indian IT] rules would result in encouraging internet platforms to over-censor content, require dangerous unproven AI-based content regulation tools, retain vast amounts of user data for handing over to the government, and undermine end-to-end encryption crucial for cybersecurity and individual privacy.”
- Internet Society: “The Internet Society reiterates its concern, shared by cybersecurity experts, that in order to comply with these traceability requirements, platforms may be forced to undermine end-to-end encryption.”
- International coalition of civil society organizations and security researchers: “Undermining security features in order to ensure traceability would affect all users of that platform, not just those that are the subjects of the information request. Protections for privacy, data security, and free expression that are derived from the availability of strong encryption would be weakened or eliminated through the use of this amendment.”
- Center for Democracy and Technology: “The guidelines would require WhatsApp to archive what each user shares, robbing them of the absolute privacy provided by end-to-end encryption, one of the app’s longtime user benefits. One large country, by adopting and enforcing these rules, could make it so that large messaging platforms either pull out or don’t offer encrypted services all over the world.”
- Stanford Internet Observatory: “Confidentiality and integrity are core underpinnings of data security. Not even the provider of an end-to-end encrypted service can decrypt encrypted information. That’s why end-to-end encryption is incompatible with tracing and filtering content…When intermediaries employ end-to-end encryption, that means stronger security for communities, businesses, government, the military, institutions, and individuals—all of which adds up to the security of the nation. But the new traceability and filtering requirements may put an end to end-to-end encryption in India. The revised intermediary rules put the whole country’s security at risk.”
- Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Ultimately, any implementation [of traceability] will break users’ expectations of privacy and security, and would be hard to implement to match current security and privacy standards. Such changes move companies away from privacy-focused engineering and data minimization principles that should characterize secure private messaging apps.”
- Internet Freedom Foundation: “The government will break any type of end-to-end encryption to gain knowledge of who sent what message and also get to know its contents. Also, this specific requirement will break existing protocols for the deployment of end-to-end encryption that has been built through rigorous cybersecurity testing over the years!”
- India’s new intermediary liability and digital media regulations will harm the open internet, Mozilla Blog, March 2, 2021
- New intermediary rules should take consumer welfare into account: CUTS, The Economic Times, March 1, 2021
- Centre’s IT Rules bring answerability in digital ecosystem. But they also increase political control, The Indian Express, February 26, 2021
- New Indian Social Media Rules Could Threaten Free Expression, Critics Warn, Barron’s, February 26, 2021
- Traceability and CyberSecurity, Internet Society, November 27, 2020
- WhatsApp: “PL to track message classifies everyone as suspicious”, Tilt, June 23, 2020
- Fact Sheet: Intermediaries and Encryption, Internet Society, June 2, 2020
- FAQ: Why Brazil’s Plan to Mandate Traceability in Private Messaging Apps Will Break User’s Expectation of Privacy and Security, EFF, August 7, 2020
- Dr Kamakoti’s Solution For WhatsApp Traceability Without Breaking Encryption Is Erroneous And Not Feasible, Medianama, August 19, 2019
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