Can origin of messages be found, Facebook asked

NEW DELHI: The Shashi Tharoor-led parliamentary standing committee on information technology on Tuesday directed the

Lok Sabha Secretariat

to send a reminder to technology giant Facebook, asking them to respond to the

House

panel’s questions on whether it was possible to trace the origins of a message, as prescribed under the Digital Media Rules, 2021.


The House panel had on June 29 asked Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, how they could trace the origins of a message if content was end-to-end encrypted. In response, Facebook India’s policy director Shivnath Thukral and general counsel Namrata Singh had said that it would not be possible to break end-to-end encryption for India alone as this would have ramifications for users across the globe.

Thukral also said they would explain to the panel, in writing, the difference between WhatsApp watermarking messages as “forwarded many times”, and identifying where a message originated. Since the written response was not received until Tuesday, the Secretariat, sources said, would send a reminder to Facebook.