WhatsApp opened username reservations worldwide this week, its biggest privacy overhaul yet, letting users be found by a handle instead of their phone number, with the feature going live in country waves starting July 7 and reaching most of the world from September. Meta says it built multiple layers of anti-impersonation defense, reserving high-profile names like public figures, government entities, and celebrities plus lookalike derivatives, limiting how many new people an account can contact, blocking username-guessing, and flagging whether a first-time messager is a new or foreign account, with phone numbers still required for login. India's IT ministry has directed Meta to halt the rollout there and explain the feature within three days, citing impersonation and cyberfraud risks. India is WhatsApp's largest market with more than 600M users, so serious pushback could complicate the global rollout.
