Quote:Facebook is under pressure once again in India, as the local government wants the company to provide a way to access private messages in an attempt to fight crime.

Gopalakrishnan S., a senior official in the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, told Bloomberg that services like WhatsApp, which the US-based social media giant owns, are being used for criminal activities like spreading child abuse content, and the only way to stop this from happening is to provide law enforcement with access to messages.
“We don’t care about the good morning and divorce messages that are shared, we only want traceability to prevent or detect crimes,” he said.

Messages on WhatsApp are encrypted by default, which means they cannot be accessed by a third-party.

Facebook has already refused to provide a method for accessing private messages, with a WhatsApp spokesperson pointing out that such an approach would be against the concept that powers the messaging service in the first place. “What is contemplated by the rules is not possible today given the end-to-end encryption that we provide and it would require us to re-architect WhatsApp, leading us to a different product, one that would not be fundamentally private,” WhatsApp spokesman Carl Woog explained.