Video Conferencing Is A Troubled Technology In India

Information and communication technology (ICT) is increasingly posing challenges before Indian government. Sometimes, novel situations and challenges are posed before Indian government that they have to resolve. This is the reason why companies like Google and Facebook are fighting legal battles in India.

There is no second opinion that India is anxious to control information technology. Measures like Internet censorship, websites blocking, etc have been devised by India to take control of technology. However, no matter howsoever hard Indian government would try; technological issues would keep on teasing Indian government.

The latest to add to this list is use of video conferencing in India. The recent episode of Rajasthan government and Rajasthan police not allowing the video conferencing of Salman Rushdie affirms this struggle.

We have no dedicated video conferencing laws and regulations in India. Obviously, we have no dedicated video conferencing blocking laws in India as well. In the absence of a clear cut law, Indian government is following procedures that do not justify its stand.

There is an urgent need to formulate sufficient rules or guidelines in this regard so that illegal vide conferencing blocking in India can be curbed.

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo Etc Summoned Before Indian Court

There are certain offences against the State that cannot be tried by any court in India till central/state government grants its permission. Such permission is granted under section 196 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), 1973 and once granted certain criminal offense committed against a nation/state can be prosecuted.

Lack of cyber due diligence and weak arguments before the Delhi High court has brought a situation where websites like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc would have to face criminal trial in India. The Indian government has sanctioned prosecution of social networking sites like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo India over objectionable content on their sites and with this the criminal trial process has begun. Even these websites may be blocked in India if they fail to comply with Indian laws.

Meanwhile, the trial court adjourned the matter till March 13, 2012. The trial court has also directed the external affairs ministry to serve the summons issued to foreign-based social networking sites. With this the excuse of being an Indian subsidiary is also gone and now parent companies would have to face the heat.

Indian government, while granting such permission, said “Government of India, after being satisfied that such content are violative of the provisions of the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011, and after due application of judicious minds finds it appropriate to grant sanction under section 196 of CrPC to proceed against the accused persons in the aforesaid complaint in national harmony, integration and national interest”. This was said in a report submitted by the department of information technology to the trial court.

According to Praveen Dalal, managing partner of law firm Perry4Law and leading techno legal expert of India, if Websites are “Violating” Laws of India and they have been “Notified” to this effect and still they “do not Remedy the Situation”, then the Safe Harbour Protection under Indian Information Technology Act, 2000 is “Lost” and such Websites/Owners can be Prosecuted in India.

This entire situation could have been avoided by simply removing the offending contents. I do not know why websites failed to consider such request. Even otherwise when such a media rage was raised over the issue, there was nothing that prevented such websites to remove the offending contents on their own. Now these websites cannot even claim that they had no knowledge of such offending contents.

The best option for these websites seems to be to remove the infringing material and report to the concerned courts. The sooner they do it the better it would be to diffuse this tension and situation.

Can Google And Facebook Be Blocked In India?

Recently we covered an article titled should Wordpress be blocked in India? The article was a result of the increasingly denial of US based and foreign companies to comply with Indian laws like copyright law and cyber law of India. As matters of fact foreign companies are openly violating the intellectual property rights and cyber law of Indians and even if contacted they are not willing to remedy the situation.

Techno legal experts in India have even suggested that US must change its policy towards foreign IP infringements and must stay away from getting involved in controversial laws and actions. However, it seems foreign companies are not listening and experts in India have suggested taking drastic steps like reasonable judicial blocking of such offending websites in India.

According to Praveen Dalal, managing partner of law firm Perry4Law and leading techno legal expert of India, Websites Blocking in India by Judiciary must be Just, Reasonable and Fair. There should not be an “Unreasonable” or “Casual Approach” towards Blocking of Websites in India by Indian Courts. If Websites are “Violating” Laws of India and they have been “Notified” to this effect and still they “do not Remedy the Situation”, then the Safe Harbour Protection under Indian Information Technology Act, 2000 is “Lost” and such Websites/Owners can be Prosecuted in India, informs Praveen Dalal.

This explains the prosecution part of such websites. However, what happens if the prosecuted websites fail to comply with court’s directions? Such Websites can be “Legally Blocked” in India if they fail to “Comply” with Court’s Directions or Directions of Indian Government Agencies like Computer Emergency Response Team, India (CERT-IN) that are duly ordered in this regard by a Designated Officer, informs Praveen Dalal.

The way foreign websites are refusing to comply with Indian laws, blocking of such websites in India is going to increase. In fact, US has proposed laws like Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011 (PIPA) and the "Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) that are primarily targeted toward foreign websites blocking, including those of India. India must also enact such law that can block foreign websites if they do not comply with Indian laws.

While pre screening of contents is not possible yet there is nothing that prevents foreign companies from removing objectionable contents. In fact, they are legally bound to remove such offending contents once they become aware of such contents. Cyber due diligence for India companies and foreign websites is now well established and websites owners cannot deny the same.

In fact, the Delhi High Court has today reiterated this position that websites of social networking site Facebook India and search engine Google India can be "blocked" like in China if they fail to devise a mechanism to check and remove objectionable material from their web pages.

The court proceedings against Google and Facebook would continue before the magistrate's court and it would decide the fate of these two companies as per Indian laws. The arguments put forward on behalf of Google and Facebook seem to be weak and they must come up with something really brilliant to show that they are compliant with Indian laws.

Is Facebook The Most Appalling Spying Machine?

I am no big fan of conspiracy theories but I am a big fan of civil liberties protection in cyberspace. I also believe that when rights are outlawed only outlawed would have rights. If you add e-surveillance to this situation, the plight of civil liberties in cyberspace is well understood.

If a company engages in online profiling and data mining, something is grossly wrong with its policies and intentions. Further, the unilateral websites censorships by sites like Google and accounts censorship by sites like Facebook further adds woes to this situation.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has labelled Facebook as “the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented” although Facebook denied the same. Now Richard Stallman has declared Facebook and Google+ are mistreating their users. Furthermore, he points out Facebook performs massive surveillance with its tracking cookies.

Over the last few months, Facebook was accused multiple times of using cookies to track users even after they log out of the service, though it has since fixed the issues and explained how its system worked. Facebook has also been sued in multiple states for tracking its users even after they logged out of the service. All the lawsuits allege the company violated federal wiretap laws.

Recently 10 consumer and privacy groups have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate Facebook. This is the second request to the FTC for a probe of the social network this week. Even Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, have asked the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to investigate how Facebook’s cookies behave. However, Facebook has denied its recently-granted patent is used for tracking logged-out users. The company says it just describes the Facebook Platform.

A security researcher claims that Facebook alters its tracking cookies the moment you log out, instead of deleting them. Since your uniquely identifying account information is still present in these cookies, Facebook can continue to track you. This means that if you log out of Facebook, you’re not really doing much. If you then head to a website that contains a Facebook plugin, your browser will continue to send personally identifiable information back to Facebook.

Now Facebook is planning to gradually roll out sponsored stories in news feed, beginning next year. From January 2012, sponsored stories or advertisements, which now appear on the right side of the page, will be part of the news feeds of the users - along with other normal updates and posts. Every time a Facebook user clicks on the 'like' button for certain brands or pages, the ad would display the user's name, picture and a line, saying he/she likes the advertiser.

It seems Facebook is well committed to engage in e-surveillance and privacy violations of its users. Further Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Adobe and many other companies also exhaustively track users’ online activities.

It is for the users to adopt privacy protection mechanisms to defeat such attempts of Facebook. Some good options include using plugins like Do Not Track Plus, Ghostery, Adblock Plus, etc. These plugins allow you to have a good control over your browser that sends referrer data through which these companies are misusing users’ data and information.

Do not trust these companies alone for your privacy protection and you must also take some pro active steps to enforce your privacy.

Google Must Choose And Declare Its Priority Now

Google has been “cooperating” with law enforcement and security agencies all over the World. To perform its cooperating task more adequately it is making every possible effort to get the relevant data of its users.

As a result, the privacy and anonymity of its users is more vulnerable to legal and illegal disclosures. At last Google objected to the omnipresent censorship by Chinese authorities and declared that it would withdraw from China.

This situation may also arise at other places of the World, including India. However, the bigger questions are whether Google would cease to operate from China and if it does not cease its operations than whether it would no longer censor the results from Chinese netizens, says Praveen Dalal.

If Google does not exercise either of these options than the entire episode would be branded as a “gimmick” to increase “commercial gain” in China and nothing more.

Recently, Google was in controversy for showing Indian Territory differently in three different parts of the World. So much so that Indian Government decided to ban Google maps in India.

Some observers have remarked that by showing different results in different parts of the World Google is trying to make happy all concerned. This smacks “double standards” on the part of Google and only shows that it is more interested in commercial gains than all other practices objected to by it.

SOURCE: GROUND REPORT

Is Google Playing With Privacy And Anonymity Of the Users?

Eric Schmidt recently commented that “If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines--including Google--do retain this information for some time. And it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

Reacting sharply Asa Dotzler, community development manager for Mozilla recommended use of Microsoft's Bing search engine as an alternative to Google. The fact is that Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google. According to Praveen Dalal, the leading Techno-Legal Expert of India and Managing Partner of Perry4Law, “There is no doubt that the search results and quality of Bing is fast catching up with the Google search engine. Bing is also better than Google if wonderful services of onion routing softwares like TOR are used. Google is not that good with the TOR services, says Praveen Dalal”.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation made a similar observation. "Unfortunately, Schmidt's statement makes it seem as if Google, a company that claims to care about privacy, is not even concerned enough to understand basic lessons about privacy and why it's important on so many levels -- from protection against shallow embarrassments to the preservation of freedom and human rights".

Google says such criticism takes Schmidt's remarks out of context. This may be true or not. However, privacy and anonymity issues have started to haunt Google. Regarding the anonymity issues, developers have warned that a bug in the latest version of the Google Chrome browser could leak the identity of users trying to surf anonymously. The flaw means that domain-name queries are made by a user's local network even when Chrome is configured to used a third-party proxy.

This presents a serious risk for the users of the services such as Tor, as their DNS data and the little anonymity they have with Tor is leaked outside and in the clear," according to an advisory published Monday on the Full-Disclosure mailing list.

There seems to be some confusion about what's causing the bug. According to the Full-Disclosure advisory, a feature known as DNS pre-fetching, which is enabled by default, is responsible for the loss of anonymity. But some developers participating in this discussion in a forum for Google's open-source Chromium browser say the vulnerability exists even when pre-fetching is disabled. Google said that they are looking into the matter and fix the issue. The spokesman of Google also said that this issue would only potentially impact a very small number of people who make use of anonymity services like Tor.

It seems Google is not interested in providing good privacy and anonymity to its users and this would ultimately result in shifting to other search engines, browsers and online services. The users who believe in greater privacy, security and anonymity must use a combination of Firefox with the Tor, choosing the Torbutton option for Firefox.

SOURCE: GROUND NEWS

Abuses Of Google Are Jeopardising Its Reputation And Trust

Of late, we have been observing the disturbing trend of abuse of Google platform by those having bad intentions and ill will. The same has taken shape of illegal search engine optimisation, artificial clicks to generate revenue, artificial clicks to increase page ranks, etc.

The latest in trend is to “flag” genuine blogs like Legal News and Views by its competitors and perverse minds. The process, though meant to sort out objectionable contents, has been misused in the past by many. We came to know about this fact when some of the Writers reported the fact that they cannot access their accounts due to “objections” by Google in this regard. Google system and process is also defective in this regard as a blog owner cannot report “review” of her blog when the account itself is “disabled”. The worst part is that Google is “disabling” the “administrator’s account” that is resulting in a complete chaos. Another fallacy with the Google’s practice is that if a single account is used for multiple blogs, all of them are blocked. This is very frustrating.

We have also “analysed” the search results of many key words and found no “relevance and connection” between the searched query and the end result. It seems the search engine optimisation has reached an ugly stage where the reputation of and trust in Google is declining. For instance, type cyber law in India and you would come across Google results at first page that should not at all be there.

We also analysed other search engines like Yahoo, MSN, etc and found them “more neutral and fair” as compared to Google. The results shown for queries were more “balanced and relevant” as compared to Google. It seems Google’s “reputation” itself is becoming a cause of misuse of its platforms. Of course, we cannot blame Google for the “unfair behaviours” of the end users except to the extent that there must be “fair and transparent” mechanism to deal with issues like these.

Google must not forget that “market forces and competition” may take advantage of these lapses in Google’s policies. Wolfram Alpha, a new "Computational Knowledge Engine" developed by British physicist Stephen Wolfram, is all set to revolutionise search with its amazing/innovative ability to give answers to questions directly - instead of directing to sources where the users "might" get the required information. It is going to change the face of search engines and other allied services forever.

Meanwhile, while our Writers have “formally notified” Google about these facts they have also decided to shift to Wordpress to avoid any such future misunderstandings and for better results.

AUTHOR: CATHY

SOURCE: TLNAV