A government source says the IT ministry has sent notices to both apps, a day after ordering WhatsApp to pause its own usernames rollout.
India’s technology ministry has sent notices to Telegram and Signal raising concerns over their usernames features, a government source told Reuters, extending a regulatory push that began with WhatsApp just a day earlier.
Neither Telegram nor Signal had issued a public response by the time of the report.
The source described the notices as asking both companies to explain why they should be allowed to keep letting users message each other via a chosen username rather than a phone number, and how each app guards against the fraud and impersonation risks that come with it.
No confirmed deadline for a response has been reported, unlike the three-day window India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology gave WhatsApp in its own notice the day before.
That WhatsApp notice, seen directly by Reuters, warned that usernames “may facilitate impersonation and identity spoofing, including impersonation of individuals, public authorities, financial institutions, and government agencies.”
The same logic appears to be driving the ministry’s approach to Telegram and Signal, according to the source, though the exact wording sent to either company has not been made public.
The pattern fits a broader concern Indian regulators have raised repeatedly over the past two years: that anonymity-adjacent features on messaging platforms complicate efforts to trace fraud, phishing and so-called digital arrest scams, in which callers impersonate police or government officials to extort victims.
MeitY’s toolkit for these disputes typically rests on the safe harbour provisions of the IT Act and the traceability requirements in the 2021 intermediary rules, though how those provisions apply to a username feature specifically remains contested.
The Internet Freedom Foundation has already argued, in response to the WhatsApp notice, that the ministry is stretching Section 79 of the IT Act, a liability shield rather than a product-approval mechanism, to control how apps are designed rather than how they are policed.
Whether that critique extends to the Telegram and Signal notices has not been separately confirmed, but the underlying legal question would presumably apply just as much.
Telegram already has a fraught recent history with Indian regulators. The app was blocked nationwide for about a week until June 22, after officials said channels on the platform had been used to sell leaked papers for the NEET medical entrance exam.
Telegram challenged that block in the Delhi High Court and lost, with the government’s own submissions in that case pointing to username-based, phone-number-concealing communication as a specific obstacle to law enforcement.
Signal, by contrast, has drawn comparatively little regulatory attention in India until now, making its inclusion in this round of notices notable in its own right.
Signal’s privacy design has long been stricter than its rivals, built to minimise what the app itself knows about a user’s contacts and messages, and that same architecture is what now puts it in regulators’ sights.
Signal’s usernames also differ from WhatsApp’s in one respect. Signal has offered the feature globally for some time as a way to hide phone numbers from contacts by default, rather than as a newly announced change, which makes the ministry’s timing harder to read as a response to a specific launch and more plausibly part of a wider review of phone-number-free identification generally.
WhatsApp, for its part, has said the feature is not yet live for Indian users and that it has pre-emptively reserved usernames resembling those of public figures and government bodies to head off impersonation.
Whether MeitY extends similar patience to Telegram and Signal, or moves faster given their different footprints in the country, is likely to become clear only once the ministry’s next steps are made public.
For now, the episode reads as the opening move in a wider policy exercise covering every major messaging platform in India, rather than a dispute confined to one company.
Three apps, three ownership structures and three different responses so far, all facing the same question from the same ministry within the space of two days.
