As you all know, Department of Electronics and Information technology (DeitY) released a draft of National Encryption policy on Monday. This draft of NEP (National Encryption Policy) has provision which forces online service provider companies to give access to their user database to government when demanded. According to the draft of this policy, all social messaging apps and websites will be asked to register in india and sign an agreement to provide all details to the government.
WhatsApp uses End-to-End encryption to their chat conversations, it is not actually possible to access messages from server side. So, the government advised all WhatsApp users to store their current WhatsApp messages for minimum time—frame of 90 days and produce when demanded by officials.
We mentioned about the same in our previous post: Deleting Whatsapp messages may become illegal in india
After this draft of NEP, social media became angry protesting again this decision of the Government of India. That’s why, DeitY has reverted on the complaints made by internet users decided not to apply this rule of storing WhatsApp messages. Also, government exempted Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites from this rule of giving access of their data to the government. All social networking apps, social networking sites and Websites which stores financial data or uses payment gateway are exempted from this.
Department of Electronics and Information Technology has taken back this proposed draft of National Encryption Policy and going to remove this clause from NEP. In this policy, DeitY cleared that the following sites will be exempted.
- Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. and social messaaging apps such as WhatsApp and Hike.
- SSL and TLS encryption enabled websites such as Internet Banking and Payment processing gateways.
- SSL and TLS encryption websites which deal in e-commerce and password based transactions.
Experts say that if this policy would be implemented according to this draft, then it will lead to breach of online privacy of indian internet users.
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