Meta: An Antitrust Case That Sent A Privacy Alert

WhatsApp's owner was fined for abusing its market heft, but what it did also sparked an online stir over privacy-the protection of which under India's new law is keenly awaited

- 

News of Meta Platforms being slapped with a 213 crore penalty by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) was met with some degree of satisfaction by WhatsApp users who had felt bullied by its 2021 privacy-policy update that offered us no choice but to let it share our data with other platforms owned by the US-based company once called Facebook. The CCI also placed a five-year bar on WhatsApp from such sharing of user data for advertising purposes. Back then, amid an uproar among users, Meta argued that the tweak in terms was benign as it related only to 'metadata' (which draws upon raw data). More pertinently, it later claimed it did not penalize users who didn't accept its revised deal; they could still use the app as they always had. But the damage was done. While the CCI found Meta's idea of data-sharing unacceptable for the unfair edge it would gain over rivals, it also judged WhatsApp's take-itor-leave-it deal as an abuse of its dominant market position. If its dominance of social media was obvious, then the force it sou