Indian Government Asks WhatsApp to Create an Alpha-Numeric Hash System to Trace Origin of Messages

Indian government has asked WhatsApp to create an alpha-numeric hash system to trace origin of messages. This proposal comes after when the Indian government announced new IT rules in India to protect and improve user privacy on social platforms. WhatsApp is the epicenter of spam messages and the government is worried about the false information spread through WhatsApp. In the past, top-level government and WhatsApp officials discussed in multiple times about how to track the origins of spam messages.

According to the company, every WhatsApp massage is encrypted and tracing the origin of a message will require the breaking of end-to-end encryption technology. It is impossible for its staff to track millions of messages that are sent on the WhatsApp every minute. The company also said that it is not possible to store every sent message on its servers for long hours. So, as the report by Economic Times, the Indian government is proposing alpha-numeric hash system to WhatsApp which can trace the origin of messages without breaking end-to-end encryption technology.

What is Alpha-Numeric Hash System

In alpha-numeric hash system, every message sent on the WhatsApp will generate a unique hash key containing letters A to Z and numbers 0 to 9. For example, if you send a message on WhatsApp, the alpha-numeric hash key will be ‘3k6s9j'. These alpha-numeric hash keys will be unique for each message, then the WhatsApp will be able to track the origin of messages. The alpha-numeric hash system does not want to store every message sent on the WhatsApp. The WhatsApp only needs to store the alpha-numeric hash keys to track the original message senders.