WhatsApp payments: Supreme Court issues notice to RBI, NPCI over WhatsApp payments | India Business News – Times of India

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Thursday sought responses from the Centre, the RBI and the National Payments Corporation of India on a PIL which alleged breach of financial data security of Indians using ‘Unified Payments Interface’ (UPI) services offered by big players like Amazon Pay, GooglePay and challenged the permission to WhatsApp to start UPI services.
A bench of Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices A S Bopanna and V Ramasubramanian entertained the PIL by CPI’s Rajya Sabha member Binoy Viswam alleging that the firms breached the RBI regulation and the existing law which mandated those offering such services to store financial data on servers located in Indian and not transfer them abroad. Viswam’s petition, filed through advocate Sriram Parakkat, said the petitioner’s aim was to “protect the fundamental right to privacy of millions of Indian who are using UPI’’, which is regulated by RBI and NPCI.
WhatsApp’s UPI services had earlier been questioned before the court leading to an undertaking from the sister concern of social media giant Facebook to tell the SC that it would not begin operations till it got authorisation from the regulators. The issuance of notice on Viswam’s petition evoked vociferous protest from Facebook and WhatsApp counsel Mukul Rohatgi and Kapil Sibal, who said once the court entertained the petition, the process for grant of authorisation to WhatsApp for UPI services would come to a standstill.
Appearing for Viswam, senior advocate Shyam Divan said the cursory manner in which the NPCI said it derived comfort from the auditor’s report about WhatsApp complying with the data localisation requirement was something which required deeper examination to ensure privacy of financial data of citizens was not compromised.
Divan said WhatsApp did not have local servers in India and operated through servers of parent company Facebook. “The twin requirements — UPI data being stored in India and not exported outside India — are not met in case of WhatsApp,” he said.