Internet in India

It’s good that the Union Cabinet today approved amendments to the Information Technology Act, 2000, aimed at checking information theft and online fraud.

But I don’t think that it covers online privacy. On an average I receive 5 sales calls daily and 20 marketing sms messages, some originating from the service provider itself and many from unknown senders and “affiliates” from sites I gave my number to.

We need strong laws to prevent data sharing and selling by the companies in India. With mobile social networking on its boom in India, one needs to be extra cautious while submitting your number at these sites, as you might as well be inviting more spam sms messages to your phone.

Have a look at this clause in the “Privacy” statement of one of the sites:

“We may provide information to service providers to help us bring you the services we offer. Specifically, we may use third parties to facilitate our business, such as to send email solicitations. In connection with these offerings and business operations, our service providers may have access to your personal information for use in connection with these business activities.”

We reserve the right to change our privacy policy at any time. If we do this, we will post the changes to this policy on this page and will indicate at the top of this page the policy’s effective date. We therefore encourage you to refer to this policy on an ongoing basis so that you understand our current privacy policy.

I do not understand the exact legal implication as such, but simply put it means that the owners of the website would be free to change there privacy policy so “keep checking” and they could as well use your personal information to “facilitate” their business (sell this data to advertisers???).

Is there a way to ensure that this data does not get shared (read sold) with telemarketers?

India certainly needs some amendments to online privacy laws as well.