On a day the Centre's new IT rules for digital media platforms was supposed to come to effect, WhatsApp took the Centre to the Delhi High Court saying that its new rules would compel the messaging platform to violate the end-to-end encryption protection that it has set for its users.
The new IT rules or the intermediary rules have been effective from 26 May onwards for social media platforms, which have more than 50 lakh users such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram and Twitter.
Two of the rules that the government has mandated for social media platforms is firstly the appointment of grievance officers as a part of a grievance redressal mechanism and secondly, to enable ‘traceability’.
Traceability is basically the government asking social media platforms to trace the origin of a particular piece of information and it's this mandate that WhatsApp is opposing.