HC demands furnished details of requests made to Facebook, WhatsApp

The Madras High Court on Thursday ordered the Tamil Nadu government to furnish details of requests made to social media companies such as Facebook and WhatsApp seeking their support in criminal investigation. The interim order was given on a petition seeking linking of Aadhar with email IDs and user accounts of social media platforms for detection of cyber crimes.

A bench of Justices S Manikumar and Subramonium Prasad also directed the government to inform it about the approximate time frame within which the draft intermediary guidelines in this regard will be notified. Earlier, Tamil Nadu Advocate General Vijay Narayan had said that under the draft guidelines, there were provisions which required social media companies to notify the authorities regarding any crimes committed through their platform within 72 hours.

Referring to recent violence in two districts due to provocative messages forwarded through WhatsApp, the bench sought to know if the original sender of such messages could be traced. Counsel for WhatsApp informed the court that inherent limitations stemming from their use of end-to-end encryption technology prevented them from tracking the original sender of a message.

Stating that the company had been taking part in discussions with the government to resolve these issues, the counsel said policy intervention was required to tackle them. In the previous hearing, WhatsApp informed the court that it cannot give out content shared through its platform to the government as the material was not available with it owing to its end-to-end encryption technology.

(With inputs from agencies.)