Countries go easy on encryption law

Hyderabad: After creating major consternation on social media platforms, the Centre withdrew the proposed draft Encryption Policy of the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (Deity) on Tuesday morning stating that the policy was poorly drafted and misunderstood.

One of the main reasons why the policy triggered a huge outcry across the country was that it made every individual feel vulnerable and looked down upon, as if he or she was a criminal and needed to be constantly monitored.

Apart from a perceived threat to privacy, the need to store all communication in plain text for 90 days and make it available to law enforcement agencies “on demand” upset everyone.

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Storage of such data for 90 days would also mean eating into a device’s data storage space. The fact that the policy draft mentioned that users would need to produce the communication in plain text format sounded daunting to many as users are not aware of the format of encrypted data that is used.

Apart from this, the very fact that the entire onus of storing the data was on citizens was impractical. “The onus could have been put on telecom providers instead of on individual citizens. it is not practical for everyone to store data as people today delete data according to storage space. No one will remember when the 90-day period is over. It is like policing in its extreme form. It is very unfair to assign the responsibility on citizens to keep messages,” said Mr Ramesh Loganathan, president of HYSEA.