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The Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the last Cabinet meeting (April 4) asked the Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to come out with suitable action plan so that the Facebook/ Cambridge Analytica kind of episodes do not happen again.
“The Prime Minister had told the IT Minister to come out with suitable plans to check on re-occurrence of such episodes in future,” a senior government official aware of the developments told BusinessLine .
The official also said that Prasad has told MeitY Secretary Ajay Sawhney and all the concerned Joint Secretaries to work on the reports and examine all the responses sent by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to government’s notices. When asked to another senior official at MeitY, the official said, “We have received reports from both the companies (Facebook and Cambridge Analytica) and we are examining them now.”
However, the official declined to share the details of what Cambridge Analytica has said in its responses to the government’s notice. The company had sent its responses on April 5.
According to multiple sources, senior MeitY officials have been meeting after that to discuss various matters and what should be the next course of action.
The senior officials including the MeitY Secretary have met even on Saturday to explore future actions.
Meanwhile, Facebook has said that it will start alerting the 87 million users, including more than 5.62 lakh users in India, on whose data may have been compromised as the UK-based data miner Cambridge Analytica pilfered them through an app.
The company said it will send a detailed message at the top of users’ news feed, offering information on apps they use and the information they have shared with those apps.
It will also tell people if their information may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica of harvesting personal information of millions of Facebook users illegally to influence polls in several countries.
5.6 lakh Indians affected
Facebook in its response to government’s show-cause notice last week, had said that 5,62,455 Indians were ‘potentially affected’ in the episode involving Cambridge Analytica.
The data-breach episode had sparked a furore in India, with the government warning the social media giant of stringent action for any attempt to influence Indian elections through data theft and said it may even summon Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, if need be.
Reacting to such furore world-over, Zuckerberg has been coming out with solutions to avoid such episodes, and the company has also started to suspend such data harvesters.
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