India | Students challenge Facebook on WhatsApp privacy policy

Two Indian students are mounting a legal challenge to Facebook, seeking to wind back changes to WhatsApp’s privacy policy that they say threatens the rights of millions of users.
Karmanya Singh Sareen and Shreya Sethi filed a public-interest litigation, akin to a class action, in the Delhi High Court asking for a rollback of recent policy updates by the Facebook-
owned messaging service. They asked the court to order the government to frame guidelines for messaging apps so that user privacy isn’t compromised.
WhatsApp revised its privacy policy to share data with Facebook and allow targeted ads and direct messages from businesses. The Indian challenge follows similar hurdles around the world, with the European Union and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission examining whether users have been wronged and a German consumer group threatening to sue the company.
WhatsApp said the changes announced last month were compliant with the law and it was giving users time to react, even letting them turn off data sharing with Facebook.
Facebook has a history of lawsuits over user privacy and advertising. In a 2011 settlement with the FTC, the company agreed that it would always ask users for permission before making changes to its privacy practices. The FTC is looking into whether WhatsApp’s recent changes violated that agreement.
A lot is at stake for Facebook in India, where it has close to 150 million users, its biggest base outside the U.S. Research firm eMarketer said India would soon have the world’s largest Facebook population. WhatsApp has over 70 million users in India, according to a SimilarWeb report in May.
When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, users worried that it would change the nature of the app, which had been free of advertising. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said at the time that nothing would change in terms of privacy for users. Saritha Rai, Upmanyu Trivedi, Bloomberg