India, Sept. 30 -- The data of Indian users on Arattai and other Zoho apps remains in India only, Sridhar Vembu said on Tuesday, amid an online debate over data privacy and encryption vis-a-vis WhatsApp.

"Indian customer data is hosted in India (Mumbai, Delhi and Chennai, soon Odisha)," the Zoho founder wrote on X, formerly Twitter. "Arattai specifically is not hosted on AWS (Amazon Web Services or (Microsoft) Azure or Google Cloud. We use some of those services for regional switching nodes to speed up traffic but data is not stored in them."

Vembu's comments were aimed at addressing "a lot of false information we want to correct" about the Arattai app, which has seen a renewed interest among Indian users after Union Ministers Ashwini V...