Last January we saw the problems that WhatsApp got itself into by publish a warning message about the acceptance of new conditions of use that, in reality, it hardly modified anything we already have, but that it was so poorly expressed and communicated that everyone understood the same thing: from a certain date, those of Facebook could consult or share what we wrote with third parties.
Now, the problem is not caused by an application error, but for a country that requires from Mark Zuckerberg something that does not seem easy to achieve And that happens by offering the possibility to its Government, in India, to be able to request from the social network at any time all the information about the trace left by a specific message, from the first time it is sent to the last of the interactions within their chats.
Prevent crime and identify suspects
The problem with this request is that messages are encrypted end-to-end so WhatsApp has no way of knowing what we write nor do we send and, therefore, much less know exactly what the start string of any content has been, be it a text, a voice note, a video or an image. Although the Indian authorities have offered an idea for them to start it up.
What they have suggested from the Indian government is that WhatsApp add with each message that is sent a hash alphanumeric that identifies, without decrypting, each message that moves through your chats and groups, in such a way that if one can be identified as dangerous for any reason, there is the possibility of tracing it to the first of the contacts that sent it. Thus, potential suspects of cyber attacks, disinformation campaigns and any other digital crime that we can think of could be identified.
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This request is due the impulse that the authorities of that country are carrying out on the new regulations on cybercrime, And that comes right in the middle of a WhatsApp reputation crisis after what happened in January. India is one of the main markets for Facebook, with 400 million users, so a new movement in the sense of imposing some kind of control could be understood as a new interference that, curiously, this time is not part on the side of the Americans.
According informs The Economic Times, the government already notified WhatsApp last February of these changes (which will have to be launched in the summer), offering a viable alternative that would allow messages to be traced without losing the privacy provided by encryption. Even so, from the social network they have declared that “it is impossible” that all their workers can control the millions of messages that are sent every minute and, much less, store each one “on their servers for a long time”, as well as decrypt them.
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