India’s Supreme Court Signals Possible Reinstatement of WhatsApp Data‑sharing Ban

The Supreme Court of India indicated during recent hearings that it may reimpose limits on WhatsApp’s ability to exchange user data with other Meta entities, intensifying a high-profile regulatory clash. The dispute originates with a 2024 Competition Commission of India ruling that fined Meta and ordered a multi-year prohibition on transfers of data used for advertising; a subsequent appeals decision removed the operational ban while leaving the monetary penalty intact. At the hearing, the bench sharply questioned the clarity and accessibility of WhatsApp’s privacy disclosures, suggesting ordinary users could be misled and deprived of meaningful consent. Central to the court’s scrutiny is whether consent mechanisms function as real choices or as coercive take-it-or-leave-it terms that undermine consumer protection and competition law. Legal teams and market analysts warn that a reinstated ban would force immediate product and commercial adjustments in India, potentially curtailing features that depend on cross-entity data flows or requiring functional separation of capabilities. For Meta, the stakes are strategic as well as legal: the company must manage domestic judicial risk while coordinating compliance in other jurisdictions. That wider regulatory context has recently expanded in Europe, where regulators classified WhatsApp’s broadcast-style Channels as subject to the EU’s online content regime, imposing new content-moderation, reporting and risk-assessment obligations on the feature. The EU action narrows distinctions between private messaging and public networks and illustrates a global shift toward treating large messaging features as subject to the same systemic safeguards as social platforms. Operationally, both the Indian litigation and the EU decision pressure Meta to reconcile end-to-end protections with enforceable moderation and clearer consent flows, increasing engineering and compliance complexity. Market participants — advertisers, app developers and competitors — are watching closely because a reduced pool of interoperable signals from India could weaken targeted-ad effectiveness, while regulatory mandates abroad could alter product roadmaps. The Supreme Court did not issue a final order and scheduled further hearings next week, leaving uncertainty for WhatsApp’s product plans and for advertisers that rely on aggregated user signals. The case will likely inform how companies draft privacy notices and obtain consent across markets, pushing toward simpler, more intelligible disclosures and possibly jurisdiction-specific product designs.