Signal saw a meteoric rise as a direct effect of privacy debate around its larger rival WhatsApp, but its co-founder Brian Acton said the messaging platform is hoping to capitalise on the opportunities with its "simple and straightforward" terms of service and privacy policy. Many users have also started shifting to rival platforms like Telegram and Signal, and these platforms have seen millions of downloads globally in the immediate aftermath of the event. "We may be witnessing the largest digital migration in human history".

The petition has been filed by Advocate Chaitanya Rohilla seeking a direction to the Central Government to lay down guidelines to ensure that WhatsApp does not share any data of its users with any third party or Facebook and its companies for any objective and pass an injunction on the updated privacy policy of WhatsApp.

While, on Monday, Ireland's Data Protection Commission - which is WhatsApp's lead data regulator in the European Union - told us the messaging app has given it a commitment European Union users are not affected by any broader change to data-sharing practices.

The Information Regulator said it made contact with Facebook South Africa, which provided it with a WhatsApp privacy policy that was revised on 4 January.

Under fire over its recent privacy policy update, WhatsApp on Thursday said it is open to answering any questions from the government on the issue and is aware that the company will have to "compete" for users' trust with rivals such as Signal.

"I think when people think about their conversations, they want a very simple and straightforward terms of service and privacy policy, Signal gives them that. Neither WhatsApp nor Facebook can read your messages or hear your calls with your friends, family, and co-workers on WhatsApp", the messaging app said this week.

In a notification on its website the Italian agency writes that it believes it is not possible for WhatsApp users to understand the changes that are being introduced under the new terms, nor to "clearly understand which data processing will actually be carried out by the messaging service after February 8".

"We have recently become India's most popular app and are also trending as no. 1 on Apple (in 70 countries) and Android (in 35 countries) ..."

We are reviewing the Garante's announcement regarding WhatsApp's Privacy Policy update. We remain committed to providing everyone in Italy with private end-to-end encrypted messaging.

We're not keeping logs of who everyone in India is texting or calling.

You can download your account information right from WhatsApp to see for yourself the limited data we collect, he added.

Sources further said that WhatsApp's policy update would also be evaluated in the context of the current legal framework. We don't share this data with Facebook for ads purposes.

Signal's Acton termed Facebook's update as "complicated" and said "it's really hard for an average user to parse it out, and understand what exactly they are doing and wanting to do, why they're doing it". When launched, this will be available to all, but it will be people's choice whether or not to choose to do so, he said.