Overview
- The Centre has extended Meta’s deadline to respond about WhatsApp’s username feature to July 9 and has ordered that the feature not be rolled out in India while consultations continue.
- WhatsApp plans to let users reserve unique usernames so people can be contacted without sharing phone numbers, and the company says phone numbers will still be required to create accounts.
- Meta has described safeguards such as reserving high‑profile names, username keys that act like PINs, limits on contacting new people, blocks on repeated username guessing, and automated abuse detection.
- Indian officials say those changes could reduce traceability for law enforcement and materially increase impersonation, phishing, digital‑arrest scams and cross‑border fraud, and have asked why action should not be taken under the IT Act.
- The IT ministry has widened scrutiny by asking Telegram and Signal how their username systems manage similar risks, a review that could set regulatory precedent for identity features across messaging apps.