Tourists gather in the forecourt of Mumbai’s landmark Gateway of India as a digital display for messaging service WhatsApp is shown on August 25, 2023.
Indranil Mukherjee | AFP | Getty Images
U.S. social media company Meta Platforms has pushed back against concerns over its plan to introduce usernames on WhatsApp, after the Indian government warned Wednesday that the feature could contribute to an increase in cybercrime.
“Users still require a phone number to use WhatsApp, and we’ve built multiple layers of defense against scams into usernames,” a Meta spokesperson said in an email to CNBC.
Meta said safeguards will include limits on how many new people an account can contact, protections to stop repeated attempts to guess usernames, and automated systems designed to identify and remove behavior that matches common patterns of impersonation or abuse.
The company also said the feature has not yet gone live and is expected to be introduced “slowly later this year.” WhatsApp announced usernames on Monday, describing the tool as a significant privacy update that would allow users to connect without sharing their phone numbers.
Citing a report from Indian news agency ANI, the Indian government said the username option “may materially increase the incidence of online fraud, phishing, digital arrest scams and impersonation attacks, by enabling bad actors to solicit and message victims.”
Authorities have given WhatsApp three days to provide a detailed explanation of the feature or risk action under India’s information technology rules. The company has also been instructed to halt the rollout until the government’s concerns are resolved.
Safety over privacy
While user privacy does play a role in policymaking, the “sharp rise in cyber-enabled financial crime has undoubtedly shifted the center of gravity towards security,” Reema Bhattacharya, head of Asia research at Verisk Maplecroft, told CNBC.
Meta’s own Adversarial Threat report in March found that online scam syndicates targeted users in India more frequently than any country other than the U.S. According to the Indian government, cybercrime incidents more than doubled in 2024 to nearly 2.3 million cases from 1 million cases in 2022.
India has more than half a billion WhatsApp users, and this scale makes it prone to government scrutiny, experts said.
WhatApp’s reach, coupled with the username feature, means “misinformation could spread even faster,” and scammers could use familiar names and photos to impersonate people, said Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research.
Some of these concerns are being addressed by Meta. The company told CNBC that it would reserve the highest-profile names, which can only be claimed by their legitimate owners, and withhold lookalike derivatives of known names to protect against impersonation.
Governments increasingly expect digital platforms to share responsibility for reducing harm, Bhattacharya said, but added that it is difficult “to draw the line between legitimate regulation and measures that could discourage innovation or weaken user privacy.”
The government oversight of WhatsApp’s username feature comes just weeks after India temporarily banned Telegram to prevent exam fraud during a crucial national test.
The government said that the platform hosted several channels that made false claims to have leaked test papers and then demanded money from candidates and their families for access. Telegram responded that the move punished “150 million ordinary users of the app” in India, and not those who leaked the exam material.
