A username is a small thing, but small features have set off big fights before. This one is shaping up to be among the bigger. Meta-owned WhatsApp announced it in a blog post on Monday. By Thursday, the government had served notices not just to Meta, but also to Telegram and Signal over similar features. It’s become one of the most revealing tests yet of how much New Delhi can police what a private messaging app ships.
The new WhatsApp global head Kunal Shah described the new feature as a “more private way to connect”. It lets one user message another inside WhatsApp without either side seeing the other’s phone number. The company says it is optional, that handles cannot be searched by strangers, and that users can switch on an extra “username key” so both pieces are needed before anyone can start a chat.
“Sometimes you just want to chat without handing over your digits,” said a WhatsApp blog, inviting people to reserve a handle ahead of a full rollout later this year.
It seems modest enough, especially when other messaging apps already have similar features. But for a platform with more than 500 million users in India, its single largest market, this is not a minor tweak. And for a government that has spent the past year tightening its watch over messaging platforms, it landed at a sensitive moment.
It is because of this collision, between a privacy feature and a state deeply wary of it, that the WhatsApp username is ThePrint’s Newsmaker of the week.
On Wednesday, the IT ministry sent a notice to WhatsApp’s chief compliance officer for India operations, asking Meta to freeze the rollout and explain the feature within three days or face regulatory action over concerns around fraud. The next day, notices went to Signal and Telegram, asking them to explain the safeguards around their own numberless messaging features.
Pushback is now trickling in from digital rights groups, while for various messaging apps, the responses have so far varied from contestation to silence to pre-emptive ‘compliance’.
Privacy gain vs fraud fears
It would be easy to miss why the feature matters, so it is worth stating plainly. A phone number in India is not just a number. It is tied to a bank account, a UPI ID, and much of a person’s digital life. Handing it to every new group contact has long been the cost of being on WhatsApp.
The ability to chat without sharing a phone number gives users a small buffer from the rest of their digital life.
“What does a username on WhatsApp do? It only restricts you to the Meta ecosystem,” Dhruv Garg, a technology-policy lawyer with the Indian Governance and Policy Project, told ThePrint.
A handle can be traced across WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, and nowhere further. A phone number goes everywhere. Garg tied it to a familiar problem: a woman shares her number once in a group, and the calls do not stop even after she blocks one person. A username shuts that route. But, he added, it is only a layer over the phone number, not a replacement for it.
The government looked at the same feature and saw an opening for crime. Its worry is impersonation. In a country already swamped with digital-arrest scams and phishing, the fear is of lookalike handles sitting one character away from a bank or a ministry or a public figure.
The notice to Meta warned that the feature could “materially increase” online fraud, phishing, digital-arrest scams and impersonation. It gave the company three days to explain itself, and told it not to roll out the feature until the Centre was satisfied.
The mood in the ministry was not conciliatory.
“WhatsApp should be scared and not us,” a senior MeitY official told ThePrint.
Even this early, there were warning signs. MobiKwik’s Bipin Preet Singh and former Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia both said variants of their names appeared to have been reserved. Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma warned that verified handles would inevitably breed unverified, similar-sounding copies.
The common anxiety is that a phone number is still harder to fake than a handle only the platform can really verify.
Meta did not back down. In a set of FAQs on Thursday, WhatsApp said it had already reserved the handles of public figures, celebrities, government bodies and Meta-verified accounts, along with lookalike versions, so only rightful owners could claim them. It called “false” the claim that popular usernames were being snapped up by others.
Not just WhatsApp
Meanwhile, the scrutiny widened. Having written to WhatsApp, the ministry turned to Telegram and Signal, both of which already offer usernames, and asked how they deal with fraud and impersonation. Telegram was also reportedly asked why it should be allowed to have the feature at all.
The cases are not identical, as Telegram’s feature is live, while WhatsApp’s is only announced. And Telegram arrives carrying baggage. It had just returned from a week-long India ban over alleged NEET paper-leak and fake-paper channels. While the government accused it of inaction, Telegram challenged the ban in court.
For now, Meta owes an answer to the three-day notice, and the government has said a weak one means no rollout. Telegram and Signal have stayed silent.
The bigger fight
The issue is no longer only about whether WhatsApp can catch impersonators and protect the ordinary user. A week ago, the username was a footnote. Today it is a test of how far Delhi can reach into a product before it even exists. That is where the legal question begins.
Even some of those who share the government’s concerns about fraud are questioning its actions.
The Internet Freedom Foundation has said the notice had no clear basis in law, arguing that MeitY cited no provision letting it clear a feature before launch or order one withdrawn, because none exists.
“The executive is restraining lawful features, and with them the private communication those features protect, without the authority of law,” it said.
Statement on MeitY's notices widen an unconstitutional dragnet over privacy features
New Delhi, 2 July 2026
A day after its notice to WhatsApp on the usernames feature, as per press reports MeitY has today evening sent the same kind of notice to Telegram and Signal, asking each… https://t.co/DL24Yvty2N
— Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) (@internetfreedom) July 2, 2026
Similarly, the Software Freedom Law Center has asked the government to withdraw the notices, put them in the public domain, and specify the legal basis for the action.
“Any regulatory action affecting such privacy-enhancing technologies must therefore be carefully justified and proportionate,” it said in an X post on Friday.
https://t.co/R7wWHi5L7Z's Statement on MeitY’s Notice Seeking Clarifications on the Username Feature
Media reports indicate that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (@GoI_MeitY) has now issued notices (“Notices”) to @telegram and @signalapp seeking… https://t.co/8Dg9ZLAsUJ
— SFLC.in (@SFLCin) July 3, 2026
The objection, in short, is that the executive is deciding what a private company may build and ship, without a statute that clearly provides for it.
One Indian company’s reaction to the flurry of notices is a small illustration of how quickly the pressure travels.
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The app that didn’t wait
The most telling response came from a platform the government never wrote to. Arattai, the India-made messaging app built by Zoho and long pitched as a homegrown WhatsApp alternative, already lets people connect through usernames instead of phone numbers.
On Wednesday, before any notice reached it, Zoho co-founder Sridhar Vembu announced on X that the company would switch the feature off.
“We will be disabling the user name based account feature in Arattai, to comply with the regulatory change,” he wrote.
We will be disabling the user name based account feature in Arattai, to comply with the regulatory change.
Thank you 🙏
— Sridhar Vembu (@svembu) July 2, 2026
The striking part is that there was no regulatory change to comply with. No notification had been issued, and no framework governing username-based accounts existed.
The notices had gone to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal, not Arattai. Yet, Vembu quickly proffered compliance. An Indian company had read the direction of official pressure and moved ahead of it. It speaks to how quickly some platforms might adjust once the government signals its discomfort, even before any formal order is issued.
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(Edited by Asavari Singh)