India has ordered WhatsApp to pause the rollout of a new feature that would allow users to communicate using unique usernames instead of phone numbers, warning that the capability could materially increase online fraud, phishing attacks, and digital impersonation crimes across the country’s 850 million-strong user base, the largest of any country in the world for the Meta-owned platform.
The notice, sent by India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology and seen by BBC News, stated that the government had taken note of WhatsApp’s announcement allowing users to reserve unique usernames and, once fully introduced, contact others without disclosing their phone numbers. The ministry said the feature may materially increase the incidence of online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams, and impersonation attacks by allowing criminals to contact potential victims anonymously, and also warned that the feature could facilitate identity spoofing of individuals, government authorities, financial institutions, and public agencies through usernames that closely resemble legitimate ones. The notice explicitly asked the company not to roll out the feature until consultation on the matter was achieved to the satisfaction of the government, citing provisions of India’s Information Technology Act and rules governing intermediary due diligence, identity theft, and impersonation offences.
WhatsApp said in response that the feature is not yet live and that it has built multiple safeguards into the system, including reserving high-profile usernames belonging to public figures, government entities, celebrities, and verified Meta accounts so they can only be claimed by their legitimate owners. The company noted that users would still need a phone number to create a WhatsApp account, that recipients would be shown information about first-time contacts including whether the account was newly created and whether it was based in another country, and that it would limit how many new people an account can contact while blocking repeated attempts to guess usernames and maintaining systems to detect and remove impersonation and abuse patterns. The username feature is expected to roll out to WhatsApp’s three billion global users over the coming months, but the Indian government’s intervention could delay or alter how it is deployed in the country.
The notice drew immediate criticism from digital rights organisation the Internet Freedom Foundation, which argued it had no clear basis in law, that the Information Technology Act and its rules do not grant the ministry power to require prior permission before a company launches a product feature, and that the notice amounted to an attempt to decide what software a company could release without the legal authority to do so. India’s move is the latest in a series of regulatory interventions by the country’s government aimed at increasing oversight of global technology companies operating within its borders, coming months after authorities amended rules to require social media platforms to remove unlawful content within three hours of notification and temporarily banned Telegram during a national medical entrance examination retest.
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