Traders’ body CAIT on Sunday wrote to Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad requesting that the government restrict WhatsApp from actualizing its new privacy policy or force a restriction on the messaging application and its parent company Facebook.
The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) claimed that through the new privacy policy, “all kinds of personal data, payment transactions, contacts, location and other vital information of a person who is using WhatsApp will be acquired by it and can be used for any purpose by WhatsApp”.
In the correspondence to Prasad, CAIT has requested that “government should immediately restrict WhatsApp from implementing the new policy or put a ban on WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook”, the traders’ body stated.
CAIT said Facebook has in excess of 200 million users in India and enabling it to get to information of each users can present serious threat not to the economy as well as even to the privacy of the nation.
However, in an email reaction to PTI, a WhatsApp spokesperson said, “To further increase transparency, we updated the privacy policy to describe that going forward businesses can choose to receive secure hosting services from our parent company Facebook to help manage their communications with their customers on WhatsApp.
“Though of course, it remains up to the user whether or not they want to message with a business on WhatsApp.”
The representative further said that the update doesn’t change WhatsApp’s data sharing practices to Facebook and doesn’t affect how people communicate privately with friends or family any place they are on the world.
“WhatsApp remains deeply committed to protecting people’s privacy. We are communicating directly with users through WhatsApp about these changes so they have time to review the new policy over the course of the next month,” the representative added.
CAIT Secretary General Praveen Khandelwal stated, “The changed privacy policy of WhatsApp is an encroachment on privacy of an individual and runs against the basic fundamentals of Constitution of India and therefore the CAIT has demanded immediate intervention of the government.”
