In a blow to WhatsApp and its parent firm, Facebook, on Thursday a division bench of the Delhi High Court dismissed their appeals against a single judge order rejecting their challenge to a probe ordered by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) into the messaging platform’s updated privacy policy of 2021.
A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad said the single judge’s order was well-reasoned and the appeals were devoid of merits. In April last year, a single judge bench of the high court had refused to interdict the investigation directed by the CCI on petitions moved by WhatsApp and Facebook, now Meta platforms.
In January last year, the CCI on its own had decided to look into WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy based on news reports regarding the same.
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WhatsApp had argued before the division bench that the CCI cannot look into a policy that has been kept in abeyance, awaiting the fate of the Data Protection Bill and the decision of the Supreme Court and the high court on issues concerning its legality.
Facebook had argued there was no prima facie material in the case against it and the CCI cannot investigate it in a “creeping fashion”.
The CCI, however, had contended that its investigation into the new privacy policy should be allowed to proceed as the policy has not been withdrawn and there is no scope for the inquiry to overlap with Supreme Court proceedings pertaining to issues of alleged infringement of user privacy.
The CCI had said its probe concerned WhatsApp’s anti-competitive sharing of user data with Facebook and not issues concerning the privacy law.
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It had also defended the probe against Facebook in connection with WhatsApp’s privacy policy, saying the former being the holding company of the messaging platform can “potentially exploit the data being shared”.
Before the single judge, WhatsApp and Facebook had challenged the CCI’s March 2021 order directing the probe against them.
Dismissing the petitions, the single judge had said although it would have been “prudent” for the CCI to await the outcome of the petitions in the Supreme Court and Delhi High Court against the policy, not doing so would not make the regulator’s order “perverse” or “wanting of jurisdiction”.
On January 3, while dealing with the appeals against the single-judge order, a bench headed by then Chief Justice DN Patel had extended the time to file replies by Facebook and WhatsApp to two CCI notices of June 2021, asking them to furnish certain information for the purpose of the inquiry conducted by it.
