Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp Servers May Reside Outside Of India - Government

The Communications and IT minister of the Government of India, Mr. Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that there's no plan to have Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other services run from servers located in India. Mr. Prasad responded with a written reply to Lok Sabha yesterday. Note that having the servers physically located on Indian soil lets the Government bring the services inside a legal framework and make it easier to crack down on any misuse. Also, when it comes to security, the problem of tracking the culprit becomes harder for servers outside India as the traffic gets routed through multiple servers and VPNs (Virtual Private Network).

Mr. Prasad also informed that the Indian Government regularly holds interaction with all the stakeholders viz. the service providers, telecom operators to resolve the issues raised. Most of these issues are related to unlawful content on the Internet. Most of the times, all the popular social networking sites and messaging websites are used by anti-national bodies and criminals which poses a serious threat to the national security.

Indian-Government-Servers-Facebook-Twitter

Regular readers of VoiCE may recall that the Government of India had earlier made it mandatory for Government Of India Wants Skype & Other Internet Telephony Providers To Setup Servers In India to set up their servers in India so that the government could have access to suspicious communication at any time, without having to contact other countries. Indian Government Wants Blackberry Data - 'Security' Is The Reason had to open up their servers to the Indian government and the government also had asked Gmail & Yahoo Emails Should Route Through Servers In India: DIT to be served from servers located in India.

Interestingly, India is not the only country that's demanded this. While USA has access to all the servers located in USA, Brazil had demanded that Facebook should setup servers in their country in 2013. While the governments have a strong case favouring them, there are many believers that letting the Governments control the servers through law would lead to death of free speech.

Do let us know your thoughts on the topic.

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