Delhi HC adjourns hearing petitions challenging Whatsapp's new Privacy Policy for August 27
Jul 22, 2021
New Delhi [India], July 22 : The Delhi High Court on Thursday adjourned the hearing of a bunch of petitions challenging Whatsapp's new Privacy Policy for August 27.
The Bench of Justice DN Patel and Justice Jyoti Singh on Thursday found no urgency in the matter and deferred the hearing for the next date.
Earlier, WhatsApp had told the Delhi High Court that it will not limit functionality for some time and continue to show users the updates from time to time until Data Protection Bill comes into force. WhatsApp further submitted that it has voluntarily agreed to put on hold the update, which triggered the controversy till Data Protection Bill comes into force.
The court was hearing a bunch of petitions and sought the issuance of direction to the Union of India to direct Whatsapp Inc to either roll back their policy or in the alternative provide an option to the users of their platform to opt-out of the privacy policy and also to provide the users who have accepted the privacy policy to be given another option to choose for themselves.
The plea sought direction to Central Govt to formulate Social Media Intermediary Guidelines as the new WhatsApp privacy policy of Jan 2021 is violative of Article 21 that enshrines the Right to Privacy, petitions said.
It further mentioned that the personal data of the users can be further shared and used by the Facebook companies as well as the third party for their commercial purposes.
The plea said that Social media in recent years has been used by billions of people around the world and millions of Indians today are dependent on Whatsapp. Therefore the information that is generally personal is shared at an enormous level. This information is susceptible to being misused if the social media giants decide to either sell or exploit the information, sensitive to the users, to any third party.
