WhatsApp India Update On Username: The ongoing discussion between the government and Meta regarding the famous Username feature of WhatsApp has now reached a new stage. The Central Government has already expressed its concerns regarding this feature and now Meta has also sent an official reply to the government’s notice. In which it is being told that the Ministry of Information Technology (IT) has received the reply of the company and now the Ministry will investigate it in detail. However, no public statement has yet been issued by WhatsApp on this entire matter.
The sources who came forward told the news agency PTI that the necessary information has been handed over to the government by WhatsApp on Thursday. Now the IT Ministry will examine how satisfactorily the company has answered the questions to security, cyber crime and user protection. But before this, IT Secretary S. Krishnan had said during the CII GCC Business Summit that WhatsApp’s response was expected by Thursday.
When he was asked whether Telegram and Signal had also responded to similar notices, he said, ‘There is still some more time, so the responses have not been received yet. We will investigate the matter.” Regarding this, it is being told that after receiving the notice, a team of Meta had also met the officials of IT Ministry last week.
On this matter, the company says that ‘the person on WhatsApp must know your correct username to message you. We will limit how many new people an account can contact, as well as prevent repeated attempts to guess the username key and have systems in place to detect and remove activity that shows common impersonation and abuse patterns. Before users can reply, WhatsApp will show whether the first-time sender is a new account, contact, member of a mutual group, or from another country.” The company claims that with these security measures, the possibilities of fake accounts and fraud can be controlled to a great extent.
It has come to light that the government is worried about this because this feature which facilitates conversation by hiding the phone number can open a new path for cyber criminals. The government in its notice had asked Meta why action should not be taken on this feature under the IT Act and its rules. The company was also reminded that being an important social media intermediary, the legal responsibility of due-diligence applies to it.
The biggest concern of the government is that through the Username feature, incidents like digital arrest scam, phishing, online fraud and impersonation attacks may increase. For this reason, the Center had given clear instructions to Meta that this feature should not be launched until the government is completely satisfied.
