WhatsApp: Antitrust oversight led to a win for privacy

When Henry Ford was asked what colour options his pathbreaking Model T would come in, he famously replied, “Any colour, so long as it's black.”

- VIKRAM KOPPIKAR

For years, Big Tech in India operated on much the same philosophy. Services were ‘free,’ but consumers paid with their personal data with little room to ask what would be done with it. Sensitive data taken from India would end up in America.That era is being brought to an end. Not only does India have a Digital Personal Data Protection law whose rules are scheduled to kick in, the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal’s (NCLAT) recent ruling on Meta and WhatsApp makes it clear that Big Tech can no longer hide behind complex privacy policies to collect data that exceeds what is ‘necessary’ to provide services. The NCLAT’s December 2025 clarification has hammered this home, ensuring that opt-out choices and detailed transparency must apply to the use of such data for all non-WhatsApp purposes, advertising included.

By affirming that privacy can be a market-competition concern if a major platform’s users are deprived of choice on sharing data, the tribunal has relieved Big Tech of a long-running illusion: that user consent equates to carte blanche for data extraction.