After WhatsApp, Centre's notices to Telegram, Signal today over username feature

THe unification ministry of electronics and info technology (MeitY) was go under to direct notices to wire and Signal over their username-based communication features, a day after issuing a similar notice to WhatsApp, a government official told HT on Thursday. The notices are expected to go out on Friday.“The rules apply to everyone. Similar notices will be sent to Telegram and Signal on Friday,” the official said.The move follows MeitY’s notice to WhatsApp, which directed the company to pause the rollout of its username feature and furnish a detailed explanation within three days. MeitY officials met WhatsApp representatives on Thursday at 11.30am, HT has learnt. According to people aware of the discussions, the company sought additional time to respond, citing the coming weekend, while ministry officials reiterated their concerns over the feature. MeitY is expected to grant an extension once it receives a formal request from WhatsApp.The trigger was the company beginning to let users reserve usernames ahead of a planned year-end launch. The ministry has said the feature could raise the risk of impersonation, identity theft, phishing and digital fraud by allowing users to connect without revealing their number.Hiding a phone number behind a username makes it harder to trace who is messaging whom, at a time when impersonation-driven scams are already a widespread problem in India, officials and experts have said.Referring to Wednesday’s notice, a WhatsApp spokesperson earlier said the feature was not yet live and would roll out slowly later this year, and that the company had held back usernames resembling public figures, government entities and celebrities so they could only be claimed by their legitimate owners.The founder of Arattai, an Indian messaging application, separately signalled a pullback on Thursday. Sridhar Vembu, the company’s founder, said on X on Thursday that Arattai would disable its username-based account feature “to comply with the regulatory change”. He did not specify the regulatory changes he referred to.The government’s sharper concern with WhatsApp, the official cited above said, comes down to scale. “WhatsApp facilitates around 50 crore calls every day. People trust it blindly. That’s why our concerns are much greater with WhatsApp than with Telegram, which has a much smaller calling rate of around 2.5 crore calls in India,” the official said.The official also suggested WhatsApp’s username push doubled as a competitive move against Telegram. “Maybe they want to capture Telegram’s market. WhatsApp wants to have a monopoly in this space,” the official said.Friday’s notices will mark the second time this year that Telegram has drawn regulatory attention. The app was temporarily blocked during the NEET-UG re-examination over concerns about the circulation of exam material — an episode the official said had already sharpened government scrutiny of username-based platforms ahead of this week’s notices.Signal, by contrast, has drawn comparatively little regulatory attention in India so far, despite being named alongside WhatsApp and Telegram in the SIM-binding directive. Friday’s notice would be among the first direct actions the ministry has taken against the app over its username feature specifically.All three platforms — along with Arattai and Snapchat — fall under the Department of Telecommunications’ SIM-binding directive, which requires messaging accounts to be linked to physical SIM cards for traceability and mandates that web sessions be logged out at least once every six hours.