Nowadays, social media is the only and best way to approach our friends and relatives who are quite farther from us. We can talk, communicate or chat with anyone from anywhere across the globe with just a phone with an internet connection through social media.
There are many platforms which offer these services and also they are absolutely free. Some of the most popular social media platforms are Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, Signal, etc. India being a very huge and densely populated country is the best market for these applications. These applications are deeply rooted in India and the majority of their users are in India. As these types of social media platforms have become the basic need of people, they started doing monopoly, as a result of which users' privacy is in danger. Users' privacy means information regarding how a customer or user interacts with these apps, what he searches on the internet, to whom he communicates with etc.
New IT rules:
### On heeding these things, the Indian Government passed new rules for social media platforms on February 25, they are:
These companies have to follow the Indian Constitution and laws. On violating these rules, necessary actions will be taken by the administration.
- It is mandatory for the social media platforms to establish a new system for listening and solving users' complaints. For this, the companies have to appoint a new officer in India who will listen to and take right actions on people's grievances.
- On these platforms, no one is allowed to use or share anyone's private photos, videos or information in a wrong way. If anyone does this, the application management system has to block the user's account and take the right actions.
- Besides this, rules were also made against encouraging fake news or information through social media.
The government gave time of 3 months for adopting these rules to the companies.
And this time period has ended on May 25 but they haven't made the changes as per declared by the government. But some of them gave their excuses instead of obeying the Indian Government:
The Facebook-owned-Whatsapp has filed an FIR against the Indian Government in Delhi HC.
The Facebook-owned-Whatsapp has filed an FIR in Delhi High court against the Indian Government. The company is saying that the new rules of the Indian Government will make the users' privacy more insecure. According to the company, the government authorities can ask them for tracing the information of fake-news spreaders anytime. For doing this, they have to keep an eye on each message shared by the users and in this way users' privacy will be like an open book. As this is against their privacy policy of end-to-end encryption, the company filed an FIR against the Indian Government without any consult.
Government's reply on Whatsapp's complaint:
Information Technology or IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad responded that tracing the origin of fake or inappropriate posts will not impact the users' privacy. Also taking the example of foreign countries like USA, UK, Canada, Australia he said their rules allow legal interception in social media. He also said that this is an unfortunate practice of Whatsapp who doesn't want the intermediary guidelines to come into effect.
What Facebook says?
Facebook said that it will comply with the intermediary guidelines issued by the government, but there are some issues which theye want to discuss with the IT government authorities. They said that they are working for it but didn't tell about till which date the company will comply with these rules.
What was Twitter's reply?
Twitter replied on the IT laws that it would strive to adapt the new laws for social media. It said that the rules are inconsistent with democratic principles and it had so many excuses.
The government said that the statement of twitter is absolutely baseless and wrong, it's motive is to defame India to hide own follies.
Many companies haven't responded yet on this. But, these rules should be adopted and followed by all the social media platforms.
These companies can not be greater than a country and its government.
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