The Hindu Business Line : Plugging IT loopholes

THE EXPERT COMMITTEE'S recommendations on amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2000 should help plug some of the loopholes in the existing legislation. The controversy last year surrounding the attempt at vending some objectionable multi-media content through the auction site, eBay India (formerly bazee.com), highlighted the inadequacies of the present law on objectionable visual content and more recently there were embarrassing revelations that raised the larger issue of data protection and privacy in the business process outsourcing (BPO) arena.

The amendments proposed by the Committee are noteworthy for their detail and also for sacrificing the liberal principles so essential to setting the e-commerce industry on a healthy growth path. Take, for instance, its view on `technology neutrality' in the context of electronic verification of bona fides of parties to a transaction. It has gone beyond digital signatures (covered in detail by the present IT Act) to biometrics and other means of recognition. The Committee has also done well to recommend that changes in the IT Act can be made through executive action, by way of amending the rules or issuing notifications. This will help the Government respond to emerging challenges more quickly as formal legislative action, given the already crowded Parliamentary agenda, has proved to be rather slow and cumbersome. Second, to encourage private-public partnership in e-governance delivery of services, separate amendments have been proposed.

Apart from these measures other key amendments to the IT Act suggested relate to "intermediaries involved in offences of the eBay variety" and "data protection and privacy" that cover BPO-related issues. The Committee is right in recommending that intermediaries (such as Internet auction sites) need to be specifically exempted from liability involving publication and transmission of objectionable material in electronic form, subject to certain conditions. Such distinction makes sense, as only the actual vendor of objectionable material needs to be punished rather than an intermediary merely facilitating the commerce. For the first time, child pornography has been identified as a specific offence, with imprisonment terms that are more stringent than for objectionable material.

Similarly, in the area of cyber security, the IT Act is to be amended to cover several computer-related offences beyond hacking. The computer-related offences that draw a distinction between breach of confidentiality (say, in selling source code or IP in product companies), selling sensitive personal data (in BPO) and other forms of generic offences such as impersonation or misrepresentation have been drawn up. While making these punishable under the IT Act, the punishment terms have also been graded based on the severity of the offences. This is bound to be the first step towards building a well-defined regime covering data protection and privacy within the IT Act.

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