Today, the 5-Judge Constitution Bench led by Justice K.M. Joseph enquired about the status of the Digital Data Protection Bill, 2022 (the Bill). In the last hearing on February 1st, 2023, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appeared, representing the Union government. He claimed that the Bill would be introduced in Parliament in March 2023 and would solve all the concerns raised by the petitioners. Background In 2014, when WhatsApp was bought by Facebook, it announced that its privacy policy would not change. Yet, in August 2016, they changed their privacy policy. The new policy stated that the account information of users including users’ phone numbers and contact details will be shared with Facebook and other third-party companies. An announcement was made that the new policy would come into effect after September 25, 2016. Worried by this announcement, Karmanya Singh and Shreya Sethi—two students—filed a petition challenging the privacy policy in the Delhi High Court. A two-judge Bench of the Delhi High Court rejected the petition on September 23rd 2016. The Court, however, directed WhatsApp to delete the data of users who choose to delete the application before September 25th, 2016. After that, the petitioners filed a Special Leave Petition at the
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