Govt tells Facebook, Twitter and others to relocate their servers to India: report

Looks like, finally the Centre has decided to take security very seriously and give huge push to legal bindings on social media sites. It will now begin forcing social sites to have servers in India, reveals a DNA report. The reason is simple, in case of information leak or hack, it gets difficult in investigating the case if the servers are hosted outside India. Moreover, Indian laws cannot be applied on those agencies. Citing top government sources, the report reveals that a meeting will be soon held with leading social media websites - Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Flickr, asking them to bring their servers in India. This will also help keep a tab on the malicious content. The concern about how to deal with malicious content was first raised by former NSA Shivshankar Menon in a meeting on August 27, 2012, adds the report. However, this decision is the outcome of a meeting held late last year by the officials of union home ministry and other stakeholders - DEITY (department of electronics and information technology) and law and justice ministry, and worked out the legal provisions that will enforce social sites to have their servers here. “The new media wing that has been specially set up by the Information and Broadcasting ministry continuously co-ordinates with the union home ministry by sending the contents trending on the social media web sites but often it has a time lag that is enough to make the content go viral,” sources told the news site. The Centre has also asked state governments to have IG level nodal officers, who will coordinate with the Centre and ensure strict action against malicious content. Recently, citing similar security concerns, the Maharashtra government announced to be working on their own **version of WhatsApp** . With its own messaging service, it will ensure that officials communicate and share information securely as the app will be hosted on government servers. The Centre is also believed to be planning to ban the use of private email services for official communication in order to protect sensitive data. Instead of private email ids like .com, .org or .org.in, it expects officials to use government websites with domain names like .nic.in or .gov.in.