WhatsApp has over 1.5 billion users globally, out of which India has 400 million users and sources said that this Friday Ankhi Das, Facebook India Head was presented to a Parliamentary Panel probing the WhatsApp snooping scandal that the social media platform has end-to-end encryption and it extracts any effo rt to access the communication between its two users “unlikely from its end.”
This Friday, Shashi Tharoor – Congress Leader headed the parliamentary standing committee on Information Technology called the cybersecurity experts to hear their views on the issue of citizens’ privacy & data security. Anshu Prakash, Telecom Secretary, and Home Ministry Officials also appeared before the panel.
Sources said that Mr. Das, the country head of Facebook, who told the panel that “it is not likely to breach the end-to-end encryption of the social media platform from its end.”
Shashi Tharoor had earlier said that “Cybersecurity is a major issue on our agenda” and “we are definitely going to take this up under that rubric. And we will be seeking clarifications from the government,” in a letter to the Panel’s members.
The WhatsApp had said it was prosecuting the NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, that was behind the technology that helped unidentified entities hack into phones of around 1,400 users. During October, WhatsApp said that Indian journalists and Human Rights Activists were among those who were globally spied upon by the unidentified entities, with the help of Israeli spyware called ‘Pegasus.’ It was the same spyware that was used earlier to hack the Phone of Priyanka Gandhi.
