The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) moved the Supreme Court, seeking a direction to the government to stop online messaging platform, WhatsApp, from sharing user data with any entity, including Facebook or its other family companies,in furtherance of its new and controversial privacy policy.
The Confederation was represented by Advocate Vivek Narayan Sharma.
The plea stated that though Whatsapp renders essential public services by enabling citizens to communicate, the recently imposed privacy conditions are unconstitutional. It is not only violative of the law but can impact the security of the country.
It also stated that the Union of India, by granting permission to use WhatsApp has failed in protecting the Fundamental Rights of citizens.
Apart from the Centre, the PIL has made California-based WhatsApp Inc, Facebook Inc and Hyderabad-located Facebook India Online Services Pvt. Ltd, as parties in the petition.
The plea stated that the court should direct the government to step in and ensure that application providers such as WhatsApp and other Internet based messaging services do not compromise, share and/or exploit information and data of users.
The plea asked the court to direct the government to frame Rules under Section 87 of the Information Technology Act, 2000, to regulate the functioning of these platforms.
As an interim prayer, the petition sought a rollback of the proposed privacy policy.
Lawcutor 