In Brazil, like many nations across the world, WhatsApp remains the dominant messaging service, with the South American country believed to have 100m users, equating to 91pc of its total mobile phone-using population.
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WhatsApp said it was “disappointed” by the move, saying it had co-operated fully with the local court.
“Not only do we encrypt messages end-to-end on WhatsApp to keep people’s information safe and secure, we also don’t keep your chat history on our servers”, he continued.
The company has said in the past that it does not store encrypted information from WhatsApp messages.
The popular WhatsApp messaging service is not working in Brazil, apparently as a result of an ongoing judicial battle.
At issue is an order to Facebook to comply with a subpoena issued as part of a criminal investigation. Blocking WhatsApp will have a major impact on the lives of Brazil’s citizens since it is the most-used app in the country of 200 million people, according to Forbes.
The suspension of WhatsApp’s text message and Internet voice telephone service for smartphones was lifted after about 24 hours when an appeals judge on Tuesday ruled in favor of an injunction by the company’s lawyers, the court said in a statement. In March, Brazilian police arrested Diego Dzodan, Facebook’s Latin America VP, in a bid to blackmail Facebook and WhatsApp to provide the government access to end user data. The statement added the decision punished more that 100 million Brazilians who use the service to communicate, run their businesses and more, and the court order is trying to force the company to release information it has said repeatedly it does not have.
The decision to block WhatsApp was clumsy and disproportionate, said Katitza Rodriguez, worldwide rights director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A São Paulo state judge ordered it shut down for 48 hours on December 15, after Facebook failed to comply with an order. Brazils current WhatsApp ban is a punishment for this.
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News of the Whatsapp ban broke on Monday as Brazil’s chief prosecutor asked the Supreme Court to authorize a corruption investigation into the country’s opposition leader and one of embattled President Dilma Rousseff’s top rivals, Aecio Neves.
