WhatsApp on Monday told the Supreme Court that it will comply with the Competition Commission of India’s orders requiring the messaging platform to give its users more control over the sharing of their data with other entities of its parent company Meta, Bar and Bench reported.

A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and Vipul Pancholi, was hearing appeals filed by WhatsApp challenging the commission’s directive against the messaging platform’s 2021 privacy policy and proceedings before the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal.

WhatsApp told the court that it wanted to withdraw its interim application against the tribunal’s November 2025 directive, which called for the enforcement of the November 2024 orders issued by the commission on the need for a user consent-based framework for data sharing, the legal news outlet reported.

Advocate Kapil Sibal, representing WhatsApp and Meta, informed the court that his clients had filed an affidavit explaining its data-sharing practices and that it will implement the tribunal’s directives by March 16, Bar and Bench reported.

The court also directed WhatsApp to file a compliance report on the user data-sharing directions before the Competition Commission of India as ordered by the tribunal, Bar and Bench reported.

The bench allowed the application to be withdrawn, but said that the main appeal filed by WhatsApp about the validity of its 2021 policy will remain pending.

WhatsApp has challenged the tribunal’s order, which also upheld a Rs 213 crore penalty imposed by the Competition Commission of India on the messaging platform for its 2021 privacy policy.

WhatsApp had informed users in January 2021 about changes to its terms of service and privacy policy, which were effective from February 2021. It said that users had to accept the new terms and conditions to continue using the messaging platform.

The previous privacy policy from 2016 had allowed users to opt out of sharing data with the parent company. The updated policy made sharing data mandatory.

After WhatsApp changed its terms of service and privacy policy in 2021, the Competition Commission of India launched an investigation. In November 2024, the regulatory body held that the messaging platform’s new policy amounted to abuse of dominance under the 2002 Competition Act. WhatsApp was directed not to share data collected on its platforms with Meta or its products for five years.

The platform and Meta had moved the National Company Law Appellate Tribunal challenging the order.

In November, the tribunal partly ruled in favour of WhatsApp by setting aside the Competition Commission of India’s finding that Meta had leveraged a dominant position in the over-the-top media messaging market to protect its position in online display advertising.

But it also upheld the Rs 213 crore penalty imposed by the regulatory body. WhatsApp and Meta moved the court against the penalty imposed on them.

The competition commission’s appeal is also pending before the court. The panel has sought that the five-year ban on sharing WhatsApp user data for advertising purposes, set aside by the tribunal, be reinstated, Bar and Bench reported.

On February 3, the bench had criticised WhatsApp and Meta for what it described as the messaging platform’s “take it or leave it” privacy policy, verbally observing that it appeared to enable data theft.

The court had also said that WhatsApp cannot expect to get away with violating the right to privacy of Indian users.