Tech2 Exclusive: India May Ban Facebook, Orkut and Foreign Social Networking Sites

Close on the heels of the recent directive to telecom operators to provide for lawful interception of Blackberry and other encrypted messaging services, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has now asked Social Networking sites based outside India to fall in line.

“Sites such as Orkut and Facebook allow for heavily encrypted exchanges of information”, a highly placed source at the MHA told Tech2.com. MHA officials are believed to be especially worried about the phenomenon of “scraps” and “pokes” respectively on these two sites.

“Imagine if applications such as SuperPoke fell into the hands of anti-national and anti-social (no pun intended) elements”, remarked a senior MHA official who did not wish to be named. “The consequences could be disastrous, especially considering the lack of sufficient monitoring of Indian users’ walls,” he warned.

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Intelligence operatives are of the belief that Jehadi terror cells could work out a sophisticated system of communication by “throwing sheep” at each other using a site such as Facebook.com whose servers the Indian government cannot access. The government has asked all Indian social networking sites such as BigAdda.com, Yaari.com and Minglebox.com to maintain records of all user activity including “change of status, profile picture, favorite sitcoms etc.” in keeping with the law of the land.

It seems that unless their overseas counterparts such as the big two as well as other popular sites such as Hi5, Bebo, LinkedIn and MySpace reach an agreement with Indian authorities on making user data originating and terminating in the country available on demand, they could soon be blocked by local Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

A spokesperson for ISPAI (ISP Assoc of India) clarified that preliminary talks had been held in this regard and ISPs had begun making preparations to block networking sites in the event of an official directive being issued. The ISPAI executive also sheepishly (no pun intended there either) admitted to tech2.com that he was in the process of figuring out a way to export his Facebook friend list to ibibo.com.

Spokespersons for both Google, which owns Orkut.com and Facebook declined to comment till they received any directives in writing. However along with Yahoo, AOL and MSN, both companies were adamant that “the privacy of our users is of the greatest importance to us” though special considerations were being made for “countries in which the growth potential of the market outweighed the prospect of challenging draconian security laws”.

A senior NASSCOM official welcomed the move though she admitted that the industry was worried less about the security implications and more about the alarming decline in productivity. “Young engineers ‘on the bench’ at IT companies seem to be spending more time on Web 2.0 sites like Twitter, Digg & Last.fm instead of improving, for instance their SAP implementation skills,” said the official.

“God forbid if all this online socializing actually translates into a real social life for young techies”, sighed the worried official.

UPDATE 1: (no, really!)

NASSCOM has been receiving numerous media enquiries all through the day. When asked to comment, Ganesh Natarajan (who