The Competition Commission of India (CCI) on Monday imposed a fine of Rs 213.14 crore on Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Whatsapp. CCI has imposed this fine on Meta for adopting unfair business practices in relation to the Whatsapp privacy update in 2021. Along with this, CCI has also directed Meta to stop anti-competitive behaviour and stay away from such actions.

abused his dominance

In its order, the CCI said that Meta has abused its dominant position. Apart from this, this fine is also related to how Whatsapp's 2021 privacy policy was implemented, how user data was collected and how it was shared with other companies of Meta.

Whatsapp cannot share Indian user data

The Competition Commission of India has also said that WhatsApp cannot share the Indian user data collected on its platform with other meta companies for advertising purposes for 5 years. This is a big setback for WhatsApp. We are saying this because WhatsApp alone has more than 500 million monthly active users in the country.

These allegations have been made against META

In its investigation, CCI found that WhatsApp's 'take-it-or-leave-it' policy update was not fair. That is, this policy forced all WhatsApp users to accept the data collection terms and share data within the Meta group without any opt-out. In its investigation, CCI found that this policy brought by Meta, which was in the form of an update, forces users to implement it and reduces their autonomy. According to CCI, Meta, through WhatsApp, has violated Section 4(2)(A)(i).

Let us tell you, CCI started investigating Whatsapp's revised privacy policy in March 2021, which expanded the scope of data collection and also made data sharing easier with Meta and its other products. Whereas, till 2016, users had the option to decide whether they want to share their data with any company or not.