India, April 29 -- The Karnataka high court on Tuesday ordered the union government to block 'Proton Mail', which uses end-to-end encryption to protect user data.

The order was passed by a bench of justice M Nagaprasanna on a petition by Bengaluru based firm, M Moser Design seeking a direction to the union ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) to ban the encrypted mail service after its employees and clients received emails with morphed pictures, AI generated deepfake images, and sexually explicit content.

In its order, the high court, which had previously reserved the verdict, told the government "to issue proceedings in terms of Section 69A of IT Act 2008 read with rule 10 of the Information Technology (Procedure ...