New Delhi Feb 22: India’s top court is gearing up to grill Meta and WhatsApp on Monday over a whopping Rs 213 crore fine for their shady privacy policy that basically lets them snoop on your data and share it like candy. Led by Chief Justice Surya Kant alongside Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul M Pancholi, the bench isn’t mincing words – back on February 3, they slammed the tech giants for “playing with citizens’ privacy” and called it straight-up “theft of private info” to build a monopoly.
They zeroed in on us regular folks – the “silent customers” glued to our phones, clueless about how that “accept” button hands over your chats and habits to Meta for ads, with no real way out if you don’t like it. The court vowed, “We won’t let any Indian’s rights get trampled,” especially after NCLAT last November kept the penalty but lifted a 5-year data-sharing ban – now CCI’s fighting back in a cross-appeal.
MeitY’s been roped in too, and an interim order’s on deck – this could force real change, making sure your WhatsApp stays private, not a data goldmine for Big Tech. Stay tuned, because if they don’t shape up, dismissal’s on the table.
