Popular social networking sites like Face book and Twitter under government eye
Popular social networking sites like Face book and Twitter under government eye
With the passing of the Indian Information Technology Act 2008, the Indian Telegraph Act, the center has all the rights to scrutinize, seize and even block the online websites and conversations. A list has been put up by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) containing the names of 11 websites, to be blocked as per government orders. According to the Department of Information Technology, this would be the first time when the Indian Government is gearing up to censor websites.
In India Face book is having 31 million users while Orkut has a user base of 18 million and the user count of Google+ is estimated to be around 20 million. India appears in the list of top 10 countries for Twitter users and contributes around 6.5% to the website’s total traffic, said online ranking site Alexa. The Indian Government intends to curb the proliferation of online networking sites to bar terrorists and cybercriminals from misusing the medium to meet their unscrupulous ends.
It is still a dicey fact how the government would track online conversations since the networking medium is largely unstructured and monitoring social media site requires using superficial intelligence servers which can be quite expensive. Cyber criminals also use pseudonyms to mask their identities making intervention more difficult.
Many companies were compelled by the Indian government to provide access to their communications data. However, internet censorship has been a trend with over 40 counties who filtered the web in varying degrees to strike a balance between individual privacy and the country’s security standards.