WhatsApp Submits Its Reply To India's Government Notice About Username Policy Change

WhatsApp has submitted its formal response to the Indian government's notice over its upcoming username feature, a reply the IT Ministry received Thursday and is now examining.

The government had issued the notice last Wednesday, warning Meta that the feature could materially increase online fraud, phishing, digital-arrest scams and impersonation attacks, and directing WhatsApp not to launch it in India until consultations were complete.

The username feature allows WhatsApp users to communicate with each other using a username rather than a phone number, a significant privacy and usability change that WhatsApp has been rolling out globally. India, with 500 million WhatsApp users, is the platform's largest market and the government wants assurances before the feature goes live there.

WhatsApp had previously asked for more time to respond and committed not to launch in India during the discussion period. In its public defense of the feature, the company pointed to multiple safeguards it has built in, users still require a phone number to create a WhatsApp account, other users must know the exact username to message someone, and the platform limits how many new contacts an account can reach.

When a user receives a first-time message via username, WhatsApp shows contextual information, whether the sender is a new account, a mutual contact, from a different country, before the recipient responds.

India also sent similar notices to Telegram and Signal over their existing username features. Replies from those platforms had not yet been received as of Thursday.