End-to-end encryption is giving Governments across the world a massive headache to battle crime and terrorism, and India is facing the same issue too. With the recent battle between the FBI and Apple where encryption of the data on the iPhone was a big issue, WhatsApp and other messaging platforms are enabling encryption to safeguard the privacy of their users. Though encrypting messages may be a great option where hackers and the government cannot snoop on the user’s private lives, this causes a huge issue when the police have to crack into messages that are passed on using this channel to protect its citizens.

In India, an encryption of up to 40-bit is considered legal and services that are implementing this type of encryption have to register with the government. Those who are using higher encryption are presently in the gray area, and so is the case with WhatsApp. Hence, indirectly, WhatsApp is presently illegal in India, but there are no guidelines as yet in the country which can ban them for now