"No urgency:" Delhi high Court adjourns new petition filed against new WhatsApp privacy policy

Observing that there was no urgency to hear the matter immediately, the Delhi High Court on Thursday adjourned the hearing in a new petition challenging the recent WhatsApp privacy policy (Chaitanya Rohila vs Union of India through secretery, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology & Ors)..A division bench of Chief Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh noted today that there is already a challenge to the privacy policy pending before the Court, in response to which WhatsApp has already submitted a statement. .As such, the Court opined that there is no urgency to hear the latest plea, before adjourning the matter till August 27.."Same issue has been raised in a separate petition. List for another date. No urgency", the Court said. .The latest writ petition seeks directions to the Central government to lay down guidelines under Section 87(1) of the Information Technology Act to ensure that the information of citizens is not shared with a third party. .The petitioners were represented by advocates Manohar Lal, Meghan and Vivek Sood..Advocate Manohar informed the Court today that the plea is not about end-to-end encryption of data. Rather, the issue is regarding metadata which is concerned with profile details of an individual. An apprehension was raised that such data would be shared by applications such as WhatsApp with third parties to the detriment of individual users..Advocate Meghan, also appearing for the petitioner, argued that popular websites often save cookies and information related to the users' profiles, which is then used without their consent. .The petitioner has urged that the new WhatsApp privacy policy be rolled back. If it is not rolled back, people should be given an option to opt out of it, the petitioner has added. Further, all those inidividuals who have already consented to the privacy policy should be given one more chance to choose again, it has been prayed. ."WhatsApp changed its Privacy Policy in most arbitrary manner and had made it compulsory for its users to accept its terms and conditions, failing which the accounts and services would be terminated after 08.02.2021 for the respective user. Upon bare perusal of this Policy, it can be seen that the Policy violates the Right to Privacy of the citizens of India. The Right to Privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed in the Part-III of the Constitution of India and also has been affirmed by the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India in ‘Justice K.S. Puttaswamy and Ors. Vs. Union of India (UOI) and Ors.’(AIR2017 SC 4161)" the plea states..The petitioner further cited the various categories of information sought to be collected by WhatsApp as part of its new policy to buttress his contentions. In this regard, it was noted that WhatsApp has sough to collect device and connection-specific information, location information, businesses interacted with by the user on WhatsApp etc. Among other concerns, it is also noted that WhatsApp has proposed share information about the user with third party services and Facebook company products, if such services are used in connection with WhatsApp.On a related note, earlier this month, WhatsApp informed the Delhi High Court that it has decided to put on hold its controversial privacy policy update until the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 comes into force (WhatsApp LLC v. Competition Commission of India)..[BREAKING] WhatsApp Privacy Policy to be put on hold till Data Protection Bill takes effect: Harish Salve tells Delhi High Court .Appearing for WhatsApp, Senior Advocate Harish Salve had submitted:"Government has asked to shut down the policy. We have said we will not enforce it till Data Protection Bill comes out. That is open-ended because we dont know when the Bill is going to come out...We have said we will not do this for a while. Suppose the Bill allows me to do it, we will have completely different ramifications."