Comment by webmobdev

Wow, this explains so much on why the Indian Government "withdrew" a letter seeking Apple's compliance with new IT surveillance rules - https://thewire.in/government/centre-withdrew-letter-seeking... ...

The indian government has recently introduced new laws that give them power to dictate terms over many online platforms and broaden their surveillance powers over online social media and messenger platforms. One of the laws dealing with messenger platforms requires the platform to track shared content, especially "origin of content" (first originator) of any content that is shared through their network. (Facebook / WhatsApp has already gone to the court to challenge this, as it claims that they would need to break end-to-end encryption for this and it thus violates indian privacy laws).

Apple's iMessage platform has more than 25 million users, and thus should come under the ambit of this law. But strangely, the indian government seems to have given them an "exception" .... and now we know why.