The Username Feature That Got Telegram Banned is Now WhatsApp's Big Privacy Sell

WhatsApp usernames close a privacy wound the country had learned to ignore. They also hand impersonators a gift.

After WhatsApp unveiled usernames, the Centre issued a formal notice telling Meta not to launch the feature in India until consultations are done.

(Photo: Aroop Mishra/The Quint)

On 29 June, WhatsApp began letting users reserve usernames, and later this year, it will allow you to message someone new without revealing your phone number—for the first time in its 17-year history. Meta is calling it a privacy milestone. An Indian court, in the same fortnight, treated the very same design as a reason to shut a rival down.

That contradiction is the whole story. When the Delhi High Court upheld the government's ban on Telegram in June, it accepted that the platform's habit of letting people "hide behind usernames rather than phone numbers" was part of what made it dangerous. One company is selling the feature as protection. The other was switched off for it.

The Case for Usernames

Let's begin with what the scam-panic coverage skips. The phone number was never a neutral detail. It is the single identifier that ties your messages to your bank, your tax record, your location, and dozens of apps you have forgotten you installed. Each time you surrendered it to a stranger to sell a sofa or answer a recruiter, you were handing over the master key to your digital life.

WhatsApp keeping that number in the open was arguably the largest untreated privacy problem in Indian technology, and it went unnamed because the country had stopped noticing it.

Usernames begin to fix that, and the people who gain most are not privacy hobbyists. The National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal logged more than 76,000 complaints involving women in 2025, up from roughly 48,000 a year earlier, close to 47,000 of them tied to fake or impersonation profiles.

A leaked number is where much of that begins: the stalker who will not stop, the buyer from Marketplace who now holds a direct line. Consider a friend of mine who sells candles on Instagram and carried two phones for years, one number for people she trusted and one for anyone who might screenshot it. For her, a username is not a novelty. It is a wall she has wanted for a decade.

The professional gain is just as real. WhatsApp was long the one channel a journalist, founder, or freelancer could not use with strangers without exposure, forcing a second SIM or an open personal line. A username lets it become what LinkedIn already is, a place to be reachable without being raw. Meta has built it with genuine restraint: no public directory, no search, and an optional key a stranger must supply before a first message can arrive.

That is the case in favour. The case against arrives in three parts, each heavier than the last.

Hidden From Users, Not Meta

A phone number is still required to open an account. The username conceals it from other users, not from Meta. Your number, your device, your contacts and your metadata remain in the backend, bound to your real identity, exactly as before. The gain is privacy from strangers, not privacy from the platform.

India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act rests on data minimisation, the principle of collecting only what is necessary, and a username reduces Meta's holdings by nothing. It moves the number from the front window to the back office, still wired to everything you do. Signal made the same trade when it introduced usernames in February 2024, and it too still demands a number at the door.

The Cost of Anonymity

For all its burdens, the phone number served as a receipt. A SIM sat behind it, which meant it could be traced, blocked, frozen. Indians lost 22,495 crore rupees to cybercrime in 2025 by the government's own count, and the money clawed back was clawed back by chasing exactly that: the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), has frozen fraudulent transactions worth more than 8,000 crore rupees since its inception by tracing numbers and the mule accounts behind them.

A username offers no such receipt to the person receiving the message. "hdfc.support" is not a bank, yet to a retiree who has just received a message from it, the handle reads far more like one than an unknown ten-digit number ever could.

A generation was taught to distrust unknown numbers; a friendly name undoes that instinct, and a name is easier to forge and easier to believe. Handles can also be changed at will, a convenience for the user and an equal convenience for anyone who earns trust under one name and disappears into another.

This is the trade no one is pricing honestly. Concealment shields the woman escaping a stalker and the fraudster escaping a police trail in equal measure, and the software cannot tell them apart. Only the safeguards can, and the strongest of them, the key, ships switched off. In a country where people still read out one-time passwords on request, a protection that must be switched on by hand will reach the users who need it least.

The Telegram Comparison

India did not wait for the first giant scam to test that argument. After WhatsApp unveiled usernames, the Centre issued a formal notice telling Meta not to launch the feature in India until consultations are done, warning that it could “materially increase” online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams and impersonation by letting strangers message you without exposing a number.

The government has given WhatsApp three days to spell out how usernames will be verified and how it will stop fake officials and fake banks from exploiting the new anonymity layer. A WhatsApp spokesperson has said the ability to use usernames is not yet live in India, will roll out gradually later this year, will still sit on top of a phone‑number‑based system, and comes with added checks to reserve high‑risk names and curb impersonation.

When the Delhi High Court upheld the Telegram block in June, Justice Tejas Karia accepted the government's contention that the platform's architecture defeated investigators. Telegram, the state argued, "is cloud-based and lets users hide behind usernames rather than phone numbers," which "keeps police from reaching the actual user."

The I4C told the court that each account is linked to a phone number in the backend that users can conceal, "making it challenging to uncover the true identity." The Attorney General likened a platform that cannot guarantee accountability to a "Frankenstein" barred from then sheltering behind its users' rights.

That description deserves a second reading. A phone number, held in the backend, hidden from view. As of this update, it no longer belongs to Telegram alone. It belongs to WhatsApp.

The parallel is seductive, and it is also too easy. Usernames did not sink Telegram. Had they, Signal would have gone dark long ago, having offered the feature since 2024 without a single Indian notice.

Telegram was blocked for graver failings: public channels holding as many as two lakh members, fleets of bots, mirror channels that revived the instant they were killed, and a company with no Indian office that treated official requests as suggestions. Usernames were the symptom the court named, not the disease.

That distinction is WhatsApp's protection. Meta maintains an Indian office, complies with court orders, and keeps the number traceable in its backend even when it is hidden from users. That traceability, most observers agree, is why WhatsApp was spared while Telegram was not. The hazard is that usernames wear the shield thin. The day the question "who is really messaging me" becomes hard to answer on WhatsApp, the reasoning that reached Telegram acquires a door into Meta.

The Safeguard Meta Still Has

The remedy is a matter of will more than engineering, because the real difference between the two platforms was never design but cooperation. Keep the number genuinely traceable, and give cyber cells a fast route from a handle to an identity rather than a months-long legal crawl.

Extend impersonation detection to usernames as it already covers verified business names, so that "hdfc.support" trips an alarm before it reaches its target. And make the key opt-out rather than opt-in, since a safeguard no one activates is a disclaimer, not a defence. Of those three, Meta can tell a judge what Telegram never could: the mask is only ever for strangers, never for the state.

WhatsApp usernames are two things at once, and anyone offering only one half is selling something. They close a privacy wound the country had learned to ignore. They also hand impersonators a gift, and they wear away the single quality, traceability, that kept WhatsApp trusted by its users and tolerated by its regulators while its nearest rival went dark.

The phone number was always both a burden and a receipt. WhatsApp has made the burden optional. Whether it has also made the receipt optional is the question a courtroom may yet be asked to settle.

(The author is an independent writer whose stories are published in The New York Times, Forbes US, HuffPost, Elite Daily and more.This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)