{"id":1018539,"date":"2026-07-03T07:41:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T02:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/?p=1018539"},"modified":"2026-07-03T07:49:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T02:19:12","slug":"india-tells-whatsapp-to-halt-usernames-rollout-justify-feature-or-face-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/2026\/07\/03\/india-tells-whatsapp-to-halt-usernames-rollout-justify-feature-or-face-action\/","title":{"rendered":"India tells WhatsApp to halt usernames rollout, justify feature or face action"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>India has asked WhatsApp to justify the implementation of a planned feature covering usernames and to freeze the rollout in its biggest market, \u200cescalating a crackdown on \u2060messaging \u2060anonymity that began with Telegram, according to a government letter reviewed by Reuters. <\/p>\n<p>Earlier this week, Meta&#8217;s WhatsApp said it had begun a phased global rollout, including in India, of the feature, which lets users reserve a unique username and eventually message others without sharing their phone numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>India has asked WhatsApp to justify the implementation of a planned feature covering usernames and to freeze the rollout in its biggest market, \u200cescalating a crackdown on \u2060messaging \u2060anonymity that began with Telegram, according to a government letter reviewed by Reuters. Earlier this week, Meta&#8217;s WhatsApp said it had begun a phased global rollout, including in India, of the feature, which lets users reserve a unique username and eventually message others without sharing their phone numbers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,60,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1018539","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-newspapers","category-telecom-the-economic-times","category-the-economic-times"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1018539"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018539\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1018560,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1018539\/revisions\/1018560"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1018539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1018539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/telecomlive.in\/web\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1018539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}