The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has said WhatsApp Pay, the messaging platform’s digital payment service, is yet to comply with its data localisation norms, the Times of India reported. RBI made the comments in an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The court had made the central bank a party to a writ petition filed by the Centre for Accountability and Systemic Change, an NGO, in January. WhatsApp has been operating its WhatsApp Pay in beta mode for one million users since February 2018. In June 2018 WhatsApp said that though its payments feature was built on Facebook’s payments infrastructure, the parent company would not store any data pertaining to payments. But in July, Bloomberg reported that this had not allayed concerns about how WhatsApp would store user data. According to Bloomberg, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) asked WhatsApp and its partner banks to provide more details about the payments system. The ministry also asked the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) to check whether WhatsApp was fully compliant with its requirements, the report said. WhatsApp's updated privacy policy In an update to its terms of service and privacy policy on payments last June, WhatsApp made several clarifications about the information it collects through its payments service. The company said that it has limited visibility on the Indian consumer’s banking details. It stated clearly that it does not have access to the user’s UPI PIN, which is used to authenticate transactions, as the PIN is…
