The Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed a public interest litigation petition seeking a complete ban on messaging platform WhatsApp. Well, that’s one more attention seeking chappie being shown his place, but this entire episode does smell somewhat like a basket of not-so-fresh sardines!

A Bench led by Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur asked an over-zealous RTI activist from Gurgaon, Sudhir Yadav, to move the government instead with his plea that complete encryption enabled for messages sent by users would stonewall police investigations, especially in ‘terror’ cases.

WhatsApp had introduced end-to-end encryption with their updated version from April 2016. WhatsApp itself did not have the decryption keys to crack the code and would be unable to help the government in ‘national interest’, Mr. Yadav pleaded.

Obviously the man thinks it is okay for the government to have powers to keep snooping on private citizens. Well, most probably in a country where a sizeable amount of families spend their lives in just one room, and where neighbours often want to stick their collective noses into the affairs of everybody else on the block, the concept of ‘privacy’ is far too complicated to grasp.  Nosey parkers like Mr Yadav are the ones who will find it convenient to pick holes in this excellent service which makes WhatsApp a better communication tool for business communication and other legitimate interactions that need to be private. After all the service is only available on verified mobile numbers, and the Department of telecom would surely have access to alternative  ways to keep track of suspicious phone activity.

The Bench advised Mr. Yadav to approach the competent authority in the government, like the Department of Telecom, Information Technology ministry or TDSAT.

  development, Media, Supreme Court, WhatsApp