Sushant Singh Rajput's death case: WhatsApp gives clarification on NCB team retrieving chat conversation

Emerging Bollywood star Sushanth Singh Rajput's untimely demise in June and following investigation has taken several twists and turns over the last three months. While the suicide inquiry continues at its own pace, the alleged leak of WhatsApp chat between the victim's former girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty and drug peddlers has garnered media and public glare over the deep-rooted narcotics menace in Bollywood.

In recent weeks, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) has uncovered several conversations between drug peddlers and Rhea and her brother Showik. Shockingly, further investigations revealed that top actors Rakul Preet, Deepika Padukone, and the latter's manager Karishma Prakash were also allegedly in communication with the criminals. All three are summoned for questioning by the NCB's Special Investigation Team (SIT) on September 25.

However, the leakage of WhatsApp chat has caused a stir among privacy advocates, as the former has long been offering end-to-end encryption, where the text or file transferred between two people will remain only with the sender and the receiver. Also, WhatsApp never stores nor reads the content during two-way communication.

Taking note of the controversy, WhatsApp has reiterated that all communication modes-- SMS(Short Message Service), MMS (Multi-Media Service), and calling are fully end-to-end encrypted and is not responsible for the conversation leak.

"WhatsApp protects your messages with end-to-end encryption so that only you and the person you're communicating with can read what is sent, and nobody in between can access it, not even WhatsApp. It's important to remember that people sign up on WhatsApp using only a phone number, and WhatsApp doesn't have access to your message content. WhatsApp follows guidance provided by operating system manufacturers for on-device storage and we encourage people to take advantage of all the security features provided by operating systems such as strong passwords or biometric IDs to prevent third parties from accessing content stored on the device," WhatsApp spokesperson said to DH.

To be fair, WhatsApp has scaled up the user privacy security after the Jeff Bezos' phone hack in 2019.

But, with the aforementioned drug case, the person, in a bid to clear his/her name, may have voluntarily surrendered the phone to the investigating team.

Or else, Law enforcement agencies with a court warrant for want of evidence can use tools to break the phone's security. Once in, its a walk in the park for them to find old archived chat conversation stored, where in most cases, are located either on Google Drive (for Android) or iCloud (for iPhone).

However, there is no denying that the NCB has failed in its duty to keep WhatsApp messenger conversation from leaking to the media.

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