Won't enforce new policy till data protection bill is passed: WhatsApp tells Delhi HC

Senior counsel Harish Salve, who appeared for Facebook and WhatsApp, told the high court as quoted by India Today, "The government has asked to shut down the policy. We have said we will not enforce it till the data protection bill is passed. That is open-ended because we don't know when the Bill is going to come out."

"We have said we will not do this (enforce policy) for a while. Suppose the Bill allows me to do it, we will have completely different ramifications," he added.

The advocate further said, "We voluntarily agreed to put it (the policy) on hold... we will not compel people to accept."

Harish Salve said, "The MeitY [Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology] feels WhatsApp's privacy policy is against Information Technology (Reasonable Security Practices and Procedures and Sensitive Personal Data or Information) Rules 2011."

WhatsApp privacy policy

The new policy, which was announced in January, was scheduled for a roll out in February.

Amid controversy over the policy, which was making users mandatory to accept it to continue enjoying the service, the date for the roll out was delayed till mid-May.

As the new policy was mandatory, many users had then moved to other platforms like Signal or Telegram.

WhatsApp stated the new policy was necessary as it had to share some information with Facebook for the implementation of e-commerce features in the app.