Union Government to ask companies to partially locate their IT set up in the country

The Union government has reportedly proposed a legal provision that makes companies such as Skype Technologies SA and Google Inc responsible to locate a part of their communications infrastructure within the country to provide investigative agencies easy access to encrypted data on their servers.

Further, to guarantee privacy, this legal provision will also require that the data of Indian citizens, government organisations and firms hosted on the servers of these companies not be moved out of the country.

Consequently, once the law is in place, companies found in violation of data leakage will be deemed as having committed a criminal offence and officials will face prosecution.

It is believed that a separate law will either be enacted or included under the proposed privacy Act, whose scope has already been expanded from data security to lawful interception, surveillance and illegal commercial communication.

At present, all operators? servers are located outside the country and the data generated or exchanged travels to the respective country. If servers or similar facilities are located in India, then data exchanges within the country would stay there.