Context: The Centre asked the Delhi High Court to restrain WhatsApp from implementing its new privacy policy, which is likely to take effect on May 15.

Details:

• The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in an affidavit said that the policy was not in tune with the IT (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules, 2011.
  • The rules require a body corporate who collects, stores or otherwise deals with data to issue a privacy policy providing for certain safeguards, in addition to imposing various other obligations.
• WhatsApp’s policy fails to specify types of sensitive personal data being collected.There is no distinction between personal data or sensitive personal data which is being collected.

Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011:

• The rules require the intermediaries publish rules and regulations, privacy policies and user agreement.
• These published terms and conditions or user agreement shall forbid the user from publishing any information that is grossly harmful, harassing, blasphemous defamatory, obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, libellous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically objectionable, disparaging, relating to or encouraging money laundering or gambling, harm minors in any way, impersonate another person, belongs to another person and to which the user does not have any right to or violates any law among other things.
• It creates a notice and takedown regime, where the intermediary was mandated to remove any such information mentioned above within 36 hours

https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/centre-asks-hc-to-stop-whatsapps-new-privacy-policy/article34114303.ece

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