Industry Odisha Bureau, Jul : Close on the heels of reportedly issuing notice to Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp on July 1 to immediately pause its rolling out of new username feature in a bid to hide the phone number, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) was also reportedly all set to slap the same notice to other messaging apps like Telegram and Signal.
In the notice earlier issued to WhatsApp on July 1, MeitY has reportedly “directed the company to immediately pause the rollout of its username feature and furnish a detailed explanation at the earliest.”
As per media reports, “MeitY is very much concerned about the blatant misuse of the username feature since the feature could raise the risk of impersonation, identity theft, phishing and digital fraud by allowing users to connect without revealing their number.”
It has further been reportedly argued that, “If the new username feature would hide the user’s phone number, it would be quite hard to trace out the persons involved in the messaging and receiving activities, because impersonation-driven scams and cyber frauds, crime like digital arrest are already in the peak in India these days.”
Drawing a comparison between WhatsApp and Telegram, reports claimed that “WhatsApp facilitates around 50 crore calls every day, while Telegram has a much smaller calling rate of around 2.5 crore.”
However, MeitY reportedly argued that the rules must apply to all messaging apps used in India.
Pertinent to note here that, the messaging app Telegram hogged the headline recently when it was “temporarily blocked by MeitY during the NEET-UG re-examination last month in a bid to scuttle question paper leak and circulation of other materials related to the exam.”
