[ By Bobby Anthony ]The Supreme Court is likely to hear a petition challenging WhatsApp's data localization compliance for its payments service on April 13, according to an advocate for Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change (CASC), which filed the petition against WhatsApp.CASC had filed the petition against WhatsApp Pay challenging its regulatory compliance and absence of a...
The Supreme Court is likely to hear a petition challenging WhatsApp's data localization compliance for its payments service on April 13, according to an advocate for Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change (CASC), which filed the petition against WhatsApp.
CASC had filed the petition against WhatsApp Pay challenging its regulatory compliance and absence of a local grievance officer based in India.
The development has come at a time when the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) is considering a phased roll out of WhatsApp's payments service in India from the current beta stage and submitted a revised proposal regarding compliance to the NPCI in January 2020.
The application seeking stoppage of trials of WhatsApp Pay in India was mentioned before the bench of Justice RF Nariman in the Supreme Court, which has directed that the matter will be heard on April 13, 2020, according to CASC’s lawyer.
It is also expected that the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) might file a new response before the Supreme Court to update it about the data localization compliance status of WhatsApp, which has 400 million users in India.
Incidentally, the RBI has been made one of the respondents in the case and it had told the Supreme Court earlier that WhatsApp still stores various payment data elements which include transaction ID, expiry of collect request and retrieval reference number outside India.