A 21-year-old youth in Madhya Pradesh has been in jail for the past five months because of a WhatsApp message forwarded by someone else, the Times of India reported. According to his family, he is suffering as he ended up as the ‘default admin’ after the actual Whatsapp group administrator left the group.
Police say they have taken action according to the evidence against the accused. The accused is a B.Sc student and was arrested on 14 February this year. He was booked under the IT Act and IPC Section 124A that relates to sedition.
This case is a perfect example of why people need to exit and delete their Whatsapp groups after they are done using them.
When you exit a group and not delete it, you cannot receive or send messages to that group. However, the chat history remains in WhatsApp.
On the other hand, if you delete the group chat after exiting the group, the complete history of the group chat will get wiped out.
It is recommended that if you are not using a WhatsApp group anymore, you should exit the group and then delete the chat from WhatsApp, because WhatsApp chooses any member as the group admin at random after the actual admin leaves. This is what happened with the 21-year-old from Madhya Pradesh who was jailed because he was chosen as the ‘default admin’ after the group’s actual admin left the group.
Exiting a group and deleting it from your phone can keep you safe from such incidents. It will also remove clutter from your WhatsApp app and save storage space.
(With inputs from The Times of India.)
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