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The government wants WhatsApp to add this feature that you may hate
WhatsApp has been asked by the government to add a digital fingerprint feature without breaking E2E encryption.
In India, the spread of false news and erroneous information about WhatsApp has been the biggest concerns for the government. WhatsApp messages that provoke hatred among people have steered to numerous incidents of lynching across India. The popularity of the end-to-end encryption (E2E) of WhatsApp makes it difficult for law enforcement agencies to trace the origin of the message and identify the real offenders. The Indian government has now asked WhatsApp to introduce a new feature to track the source of the messages without removing the E2E encryption.
Here is everything that you should know.
1. WhatsApp has been asked to add a feature that will "digitally fingerprint" all WhatsApp messages
2. The government wants every WhatsApp message to have 'digital fingerprint' will help track the origin of a particular message on WhatsApp.
3. WhatsApp should be able to inform the government about the original sender of a message, how many people it, forwarded it and more.
4. WhatsApp has been asked by the government to add this digital fingerprint feature without breaking E2E encryption
5. With this new feature, the government will not be able to read WhatsApp chats and or know the contents of a particular message
6. As per the government, other than the police or other law enforcement agencies no one will have access to the content
7. Currently, the police rely on metadata information like a profile picture, phone number, group member names, location, time of chats, duration of chats, IP addresses, contacts and more
8. The government claims that this metadata information of WhatsApp is not enough to track the culprits
9. Experts say that executing this feature on WhatsApp, Facebook has to restructure the entire architecture of WhatsApp
10. Digitally fingerprinting every WhatsApp message is actually a bit difficult
11. WhatsApp claims that the ability to trace WhatsApp messages undermines E2E encryption and increases the risk of government surveillance.
12. India is not the first country to demand 'access' to WhatsApp messages
Lawmakers in the UK, Australia, Germany and some other parts of the world also made a similar proposal where they can track WhatsApp messages.
13. Recently Australia has introduced a law that allows police to get pass encryption while Singapore's new law allows police to monitor private chat groups
