'Zoom violates Right to Privacy', Lawyers write letter petition to CJI, asks for ban on app

The Ministry of Home Affairs has announced that 'Zoom App' is not safe to use in terms of Cyber Crime. The statement by the Ministry has been observed by everyone around.

In view of the same, the Supreme Court Advocates has written a letter to the Chief Justice S A Bobde concerning to violation of Fundamental Right of Privacy by of the citizens using of video conferencing app 'Zoom'.

The Petition recommends to ban the app if found unsafe for children on testing.

Zoom App whose use intensively increased after the Government of India announced Nationwide Lockdown in view of the Global Pandemic of COVID-19. This restricted physical movement of people and thus to connect and coduct work, they downloaded the app.

The app popularliy started getting used to communicate work, attend meeting, take online classes and other works possible for audio/visual facilities. 

It was after this outbreak, experts found out that this app is not secured with end to end encryption as safety feature and also some malicious ransom e-mails were received by zoom app users. 

They suspected possible data misuse for exploitation and their videos usage for illegal and pornographic purposes. Special concern has been shown for childern using the app.

The Letter Petition refered that the MHA in its advisory issued on 12.04.2020 accepted the facts of concern but the Ministry didn't initiate ban order on Zoom application.

The petition points that developers of the application have accepted vulnerabilities in it and stated that considerable time is required to fix them. 

The Petitioners stressed on need to ban the app as advisory of MHA cannot be followed by every normal user of app putting user data at heavy risk resulting in mass violation of privacy.

The petition referred to the K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India ruling and emphasised on the fact that the fundamental right to privacy is sacrosanct right guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India as decided by the nine Judges constitution bench of Supreme Court. 

Therefore the petitioners pleaded for  suo moto cognisance of this serious issue and urged for orders to protect Fundamental Right of privacy of all citizens.

The letter petition drafted by Advocate Sanpreet Singh Ajmani and Advocate  Aneesh Sharma.