The National Company Law Appellate Tribunal (NCLAT) has clarified that WhatsApp must apply the Competition Commission of India’s (CCI) user-choice and transparency safeguards to all non-WhatsApp data sharing, including advertising-related data sharing with Meta companies.
In an order on a clarification application filed by the CCI, the Tribunal said its November 4, 2025 judgment contained an inadvertent mismatch between its findings and the operative directions. If left uncorrected, that mismatch could have allowed WhatsApp to bypass disclosure obligations when sharing user data for advertising purposes.
To address this, NCLAT clarified that the safeguards imposed by the CCI in its November 2024 order, covering disclosure, opt-out rights, and purpose limitation, apply uniformly to both advertising and non-advertising data sharing. The Tribunal granted WhatsApp three months to implement the changes.
Why Isn’t Advertising Data Exempt?
NCLAT said it never intended to place advertising-related data outside user-choice safeguards, even though it had set aside the CCI’s five-year ban on advertising-related data sharing.
Across its findings, the Tribunal anchored the case in a single governing principle: users must retain the right to decide what data WhatsApp collects, for which purposes, and for how long. The Tribunal repeatedly held that any non-essential collection or cross-use of data, including for advertising, can occur only with the concerned user’s express and revocable consent.
However, confusion arose from the way the Tribunal framed its operative directions. While setting aside the CCI’s five-year ban on advertising-related data sharing, the Tribunal inadvertently also set aside the phrase “except paragraph 247.2.1.” As a result, advertising-related data sharing appeared to escape the obligation to provide explanations about what data is shared and for what purpose.
If left uncorrected, this drafting slip would have produced an unintended outcome. As the order records:
“The implication of setting aside the Clause at para 247.2.1 is that WhatsApp gets an exception for data sharing for advertising purposes by not providing any explanation, as is noted in this Clause. And this is not intended by us.”
The Tribunal therefore clarified that all disclosure, opt-out, and purpose-limitation obligations apply to advertising data as well, deleting the phrase that had carved out this unintended exception.
What the CCI Found in Its 2024 Order?
For context, the clarification flows from the CCI’s November 2024 order against WhatsApp and Meta over WhatsApp’s 2021 privacy policy update.
The CCI found that WhatsApp abused its dominant position by forcing users to accept expanded data sharing with Meta through a “take-it-or-leave-it” consent framework. Users who wanted to continue using WhatsApp had no meaningful option to refuse the policy, even though the data sharing extended beyond…
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