A Brazilian judge has ordered a three day ban, which started Monday at 2 p.m., on the use of WhatsApp across Brazil, will affect more than half of the country’s 204 million people.
A Brazilian judge opted for this course of action due to the Facebook-owned company’s refusal to aid in a drug-related criminal investigation. Brazil made a similar play on WhatsApp in December, but a judge reversed the ban almost immediately, and this time, the government is attempting to levy a $140,000 per day fine for noncompliance.
The Wall Street Journal reported that a WhatsApp spokesman explained the judge’s decision by stating, “After cooperating to the full extent of our ability with the local courts, we are disappointed a judge in Sergipe decided yet again to order the block of WhatsApp in Brazil.”
WhatsApp went on to elaborate that what was being asked of them was impossible to comply with since customer data is not stored by them. Besides not being stored by the firm, WhatsApp messages are also encrypted end-to-end, making them otherwise impossible to read outside of a vulnerability in the application’s code.
So aside from likely being deeply unpopular among Brazilians, the ban is unlikely to result in any major intelligence breakthroughs.
More than 1 billion consumers use the app worldwide, according to CNBC. Despite the company’s claims of lacking the information wanted by authorities, this did not stop Brazilian police picking up the Brazil-based Vice President of Facebook’s Latin American operations, Diego Dzodan, in March.
Authorities justified the brief detainment of Dzodan by claiming that his firm was not doing everything it could to aid in the investigation of a drug crime.
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