A Delhi High Court judge on Thursday recused herself from hearing two petitions filed by Facebook and WhatsApp against a Competition Commission of India order to investigate the messaging platform’s new privacy policy, PTI reported.
Justice Prathiba M Singh directed the registry of the High Court to list the case before another bench on April 12, subject to the orders of the chief justice.
On March 24, the Competition Commission of India had directed its investigation arm, the director general, to complete the inquiry within 60 days after prima facie finding that the Facebook-owned company has violated competition law provisions through its “exploitative and exclusionary conduct” in the garb of the policy update.
“The commission is of prima facie opinion that the ‘take-it-or-leave-it’ nature of privacy policy and terms of service of WhatsApp and the information sharing stipulations mentioned therein, merit a detailed investigation in view of the market position and market power enjoyed by WhatsApp,” the fair trade regulator said.
However, both WhatsApp and Facebook in their petition argued that a case about the new privacy policy was already being heard by the Supreme Court. And so, they said, the Competition Commission of India need not order an investigation.
On March 18, the Centre had also requested the Delhi High Court to restrain WhatsApp from implementing its new privacy policy till a decision is made on the petitions challenging its validity.
WhatsApp had announced changes to its privacy policy on January 4. Questions were raised about how the company was forcing users to agree to share their information with Facebook if they want to keep using the service.
According to the messaging app, the update does not expand the platform’s ability to share data with Facebook but intends to give users further transparency about how it collects, uses and shares information.
On February 15, the Supreme Court had directed WhatsApp to give an undertaking that private data of users was not being shared with a third party. The court told the messaging platform that people value their privacy more than money.
After this, WhatsApp had indicated that it would go ahead with its controversial privacy policy and announced an outreach exercise to familiarise users with it. The company had initially said that it would push back the changes to May 15 from February 8.
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