May give up smartphone, says judge as SC asks govt for social media rules

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Tuesday asked the Centre to state in three weeks, the time it would require for putting in place the rules that would regulate and make accountable social media platforms to address the concerns of state security, reputation of individuals, other illegalities by curbing their misuse.

Seeking response from the ministry of information and technology on the broad time frame for finalising the rules that would obligate the social media intermediaries to co-operate with the investigating agencies in cracking cyber crime, a bench of Justice Deepak Gupta and Justice Aniruddha Bose said neither neither high court nor Supreme Court were equipped to deal with the issue of curbing the misuse of platforms like WhatsApp and others.

“I don’t think that either high court or we can decide this issue here. Government and I-T department alone can do it”, said Justice Gupta as senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi and Kapil Sibal appearing for Facebook and Whatsapp urged the court to transfer to itself all the petitions pending before Bombay, Madras and MP high courts.

Attorney General K.K.Venugopal appearing for Tamil Nadu took strong exception to Mr Rohatgi telling the court that high courts can’t decide this

The attorney general said let Madras high court decide the matter before it concerning social media and that they will have the benefit of one judgment. The attorney general said, “Somehow the Madras high court wants to decide, they (social medial platforms
— facebook and Whatsapp) have an inkling which way the matter was going, therefore they want it to be transferred.”Kapil Sibal appeared lapping up the suggestion from the bench that let government decide the issue.

The issue involved in tracing the person who is the originator of a post that targeted the national security.

The bench was not impressed when Mr Sibal said that the source of a the massage or its origin could be tracked if posted on facebook but not in case of Whatsapp which is encrypted form from end to end.

Mr Mehta told the court that a post could be by someone faking identity and it is necessary to ascertain its source.

“No one can say that there is no technology by which the originator of the post (being tracked by the investigating agencies) could not be traced”, said Justice Gupta underlining that the social media intermediaries cannot say that there was lack of technology to trace fake news.

While safeguarding the privacy which is important, bench favoured framing of “strict rules” to protect the security of the country.

Pointing to the “dangerous limits” to which technology has already crossed, Justice Gupta said, “It’s quite dangerous the way this technology is, I was telling somebody that I was thinking of giving up my smart phone and going back to old ways.”