This is just a show of power by poorly informed people and a gimmick to distract people. Don’t read too much into this as the government caring about privacy.

This is just a show of power by poorly informed people and a gimmick to distract people. Don’t read too much into this as the government caring about privacy. The central government in India has no interest in the privacy of residents or citizens. This government argued in the Supreme Court that Indians do not have the right to privacy in the constitutional case about it a few years ago (fortunately, the Supreme Court disagreed and declared that privacy as a fundamental right is read in/through a few articles in the constitution). This government also sold vehicle registration and related data to several entities for money. It has pushed the poorly designed and poorly implemented Aadhaar biometric identity for residents for almost everything, resulting in denial of service and also deaths (including starvation deaths of kids) due to people not getting their entitlements. This government hurriedly got a couple of private companies (Make My Trip and 1mg) to develop a “contact tracing app” called Aarogya Setu for COVID-19 that requires 24/7 location access and Bluetooth to be on as well. The data from the apps is stored in central servers that these private companies have access to (a right to information request showed that the government isn’t really aware who engaged the companies or what the relationship with the government is). The application was declared to be open source but the sources have been old versions released a long time after, and have little bearing to what’s in the app stores. India still doesn’t have a privacy law (personal data protection law). It has been in the works for a very long time, though broad reasoning in the draft gives the government the power to compel anyone to provide data. The recent suspensions of prominent politicians in the U.S. by major tech companies has triggered the ruling party and the central government to worry about the “control” that these companies wield. The government is worried that its own propaganda troll armies (called “IT cell” locally) will start facing such issues. The ministry that wrote to WhatsApp to not implement the new policy wouldn’t even know that WhatsApp has been sharing information with Facebook since 2016 (when it temporarily allowed some users to opt out, which most didn’t because they didn’t understand or care about the implications). The government, faced with farmers agitating against recent laws and unwilling to accept anything but a repeal of those, seems to consider this as a time to gather some goodwill by making WhatsApp kneel to show who’s the boss in the country (both the carrot and the stick here are WhatsApp Pay’s sustainability and future). P.S.: I haven’t listed sources for the claims made above, because all of them, except for the personal speculation about why the government is doing this, can be verified from authentic news sources online.