Should WhatsApp Be Compelled to Share Data with Governments? And how would you feel if it where your conversations they are looking into?
For the third time in less than a year, Brazil’s judiciary has ordered that WhatsApp be shut down across the entire country. The judge in Rio de Janeiro made this decision because the company refused to provide information for a police investigation.
WhatsApp has often clashed with Brazilian justice. In March, for instance, a Facebook vice president in Brazil was arrested because, according to the judiciary, there was ‘repeated refusal to provide information needed in an investigation into organized crime and drug trafficking.’
Drug Trafficking A few months earlier, in December, WhatsApp was also shut down for a day because the Facebook-owned company refused to hand over information about drug trafficking suspects to the authorities.
This raises a significant question: Should messaging platforms like WhatsApp be forced to share data with governments, especially in cases involving serious crimes like drug trafficking?
