WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter exempted from purview of National Encryption Policy

However, after a public outrage grew on the new draft proposal which mandated storing messages that people send through WhatsApp, SMS, E-mail or any such service, the government on Tuesday chose to exempt all social media websites and applications from the purview of the National Encryption Policy.

The government is mulling over a policy decision that could make it mandatory for all users to to save their messages and emails for up to 90 days, and be able to produce them when asked by authorities.

The proposed policy, issued by the DeitY would be applicable on everyone including citizens, government departments, academic institutions, and for all kind of personal or official communications.

The revised policy also exempts SSL / TLS encryption products used in internet-banking and payment gateways as well as SSL / TLS encryption products being used for e-commerce and password-based transactions. It was also said that all services offering encrypted communication must alert their presence to the government. Modi is scheduled to meet the chief executives of Microsoft and Google as well as visit the Facebook campus where he will address a town hall-style meeting with the social media giant's cofounder Mark Zuckerberg.

The experts sitting at Department of Electronics and Information Technology DeitY have come up with a draft encryption policy that should put some serious fear in your mind if you are a user of various messaging apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Hike and others. Once the plain text is with the government, there is no way to verify it with the original digital data as the practices of law enforcement in safeguarding the integrity of data are not laid out very clearly, he added. "We are proud of the steps taken by our government to promote it. I want to make it clear that what was released yesterday was just a draft and not the view of the government".

The stated mission of the policy is to provide confidentiality of information in cyber space for individuals, protect sensitive or proprietary information, and ensure reliability and integrity of nationally-critical information systems and networks.

The "C category" as per the draft are all citizens including personnel of government and business performing non-official or personal functions. He also asserted that users of social media platforms and Web applications fell outside the scope of an encryption policy