The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed Whatsapp to
inform Indian users at large that they needn't accept the the platform's 2021
privacy policy in order to be able to use it.
“WhatsApp’s functionality would remain unaffected till
the Data Protection Bill comes into existence,” the court said.
In a letter written to the Ministry of Electronics and
Information Technology (MeitY) on May 22, 2021, WhatsApp had said its
users in India who have not yet accepted its latest privacy policy (made that
year), would not face any disruptions while using the application.
The Bench directed WhatsApp to issue, on two
separate occasions, a full-page advertisement containing the details of this
undertaking, in five national newspapers.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court said it will
examine whether it should now consider the plea challenging WhatsApp’s policy
to share users’ data with the parent company Meta (Facebook) and others after
the Centre submitted that it was going to bring a data protection bill in
the Budget Session.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told a five-judge
Constitution bench headed by Justice K M Joseph, that a data protection
bill is likely to be introduced in the second half of the ongoing
Parliament session.
Senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for the
petitioners, submitted that the introduction of a Bill itself should not defer
the taking up of this case. He said the prayer he was seeking was that personal
data cannot be shared with the Facebook group of companies.
The apex court was hearing the plea filed by two
students, Karmanya Singh Sareen and Shreya Sethi, who had challenged the
sharing of user data by WhatsApp with Facebook and others.