Proactive tracking will ‘make suspects out of people’: Petitioner of 66A SC judgment
The government’s move to ask ‘significant social media intermediaries’ to have automated tools to proactively track certain words is akin to “active hunting”, and will “make suspects out of people”, privacy activist and lawyer Shreya Singhal told The Indian Express.
It was on Singhal’s plea that the Supreme Court had in 2015 struck down Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, saying that the provision “clearly affects” the fundamental right to freedom of speech and expression, guaranteed by the constitution.
Other provisions announced in the new guidelines for social media intermediaries last week, such as messaging apps needing to “enable the identification of the first originator of the information on its computer resource”, would end up weakening overall security, harm privacy and contradict the principles of data minimisation endorsed in the IT Ministry’s draft Data Protection Bill, according to Udbhav Tiwari, public policy advisor at Mozilla Corporation.
“Say one of the track words is interfaith marriage or love jihad, then you are criminalising your entire population … your entire citizenry you are making a suspect and from that suspects’ pool, you have a crime already. You want to attribute that crime to some people,” said Singhal.
A two-judge Bench of (now retired) Justice J Chelameswar and Justice Rohinton F Nariman had in their judgment in the Section 66A case also said that phrases like “annoying”, “inconvenient” and “grossly offensive” were extremely vague in nature and that what one person found offensive may not be as offensive to the other.
The new guidelines for social media intermediaries, announced by the Centre on February 25 put the onus of using “technology-based measures, including automated tools or other mechanisms to proactively identify information” related to rape, child sexual abuse or any conduct related to that, whether explicit or implicit.
