On Monday, Meta the parent company of Whatsapp, is expected to provide the Indian government with a detailed note on its plan to roll out usernames on the messaging platform.
India had directed the company to pause the rollout, warning that the “username feature may materiallly incerease the risk of online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams and impersonation attacks, by enabling bad actors to solicit and message victims.”
Meta has insisted that there is no cause for concern claiming that “Users still require a phone number to use Whatsapp and we’ve built multiple layers of defence against scams into usernames.”
Nevertheless, Meta paused the rollout given that India is its biggest market (over one billion users) and the first where the new feature is being introduced.
Tech industry observers have counselled government to stay firm, warning that “anonymity is a weapon of mass destruction”, and although anonymity is allowed in emails and other messaging apps, there’s a subtle difference in the case of Whatsapp.
It is very popular in India given that it is voice-based. Government assessments have shown that anonymity “may materially increase the incidence of online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams and impersonation attacks by enabling bad actors to solicit and message victims.”
Meta has acknowledged as much in its Adversarial Threat Report in March, that online scam syndicates targeted users in India more frequently than any other country except the US. The Indian Government’s own figures show nearly 2.3 million cases of cybercrime in 2024 from 1 million cases in 2022.
This scrutiny against foreign social media platforms is now expanding across the industry; as MeitY also issued notices to messaging competitors Telegram and Signal on July 2 regarding their own username features. This broader crackdown follows a recent temporary ban on Telegram in India during a national medical entrance examination retest, the BBC reported.
Despite these notices, digital rights organizations have criticized the government’s intervention, arguing it lacks the legal authority to dictate specific software features to private companies. The Internet Freedom Foundation argued the government’s notice has “no clear basis in law,” exposing gaps in the security and governance frameworks surrounding data protection.
