Following severe public backlash, the Competition Commission of India (CCI), the country's anti-trust watchdog, on Thursday opened a probe into WhatsApp's "exploitative and exclusionary conduct… in the garb of this policy update".
The CCI will be compiling a report over its anti-trust investigation on the app's new privacy policy within 60 days.
Highlighting other concerns regarding WhatsApp's mandatory policy, the CCI noted aspects such as its "opacity, vagueness, open-endedness, and incomplete disclosures".
"Users have not been provided with appropriate granular choice, neither up front nor in the fine print, to object to or opt-out of specific data sharing terms, which prima facie appear to be unfair and unreasonable for WhatsApp users", the CCI said in 21-page order on Thursday.
The app that claims to be used by two billion people worldwide has said that it does not share or store information such as call logs and message content as well as locations exchanged privately between users in their chats.
Over the past few months, WhatsApp has resorted to various methods to assure people that their private chats are end-to-end encrypted. In India, not only did WhatsApp roll out official status updates regarding the privacy policy on its app, it also took out front page spots in leading Indian newspapers to flash advertisements that claimed user privacy matters most to the app.
A recent survey conducted by the Indian market research firm Better World–BM Nxt with over 500 participants, however, revealed that 82 percent of WhatsApp users in the country are against the app's privacy policy.
WhatsApp has repeatedly been flashing reminders on its app asking users to either accept the policy by 15 May, or delete their accounts.
