Imagine being thrown into jail for an innocuous Tweet. Or being sacked by your employer for an innocent status message. Worse, your wife files for divorce based on on what you put up on Facebook!
Social networking may be gaining traction across India, but the growing army of users riveted on microblogging websites such as Facebook and Twitter would do well to focus beyond privacy settings.
A humorous status message or an impromptu Tweet could get a person arrested, fired, or even divorced by recent changes in the country's IT laws, a development that seems to have gone unnoticed by most users bitten by the social networking bug.
Amendments to India's IT Act, notified last October, make status messages and Tweets admissible as electronic evidence and the onus of the posts on these accounts now rests solely on users, say cyber lawyers.
"Messages on a social networking can be used as electronic evidence under the IT Act," says lawyer Pavan Duggal, adding that posting a tweet or a status message online amounts to publishing in the public domain.
India has a teeming social networking population of about 35 million. Orkut dominates the spectrum with 15.5 million users, followed by Facebook at 10.3 million users, LinkedIn at 2.2 million users and Twitter at 1.4 million users, according to online audience measurement site Vizisense.
```Hey, this is Andrew calling. Do you have a minute? Can I talk you through the new features of your card?'' The voice of a Gurgaon call centre employee, thinly disguised as American by rolling the Rs, addressing a customer in Iowa, may become a thing of the past. The traditional voice calls that tried to sweettalk Americans into buying everything from credit cards to computers and which catapulted India to fame as the world's back-office, is fading out.
Competition from countries that have a greater cultural affinity with the US is fast upstaging India in outsourced voice services, compelling call centres to diversify into non-voice areas and give up their efforts to change the accents of Indians. Some centres have started moving up to higher-end voice based services that requires technical knowledge and problem-solving capabilities (a space where India still has an advantage), while some others are moving to service domestic call requirements.
In voice, many customers prefer the Philippines, a country that has been a US naval base and is hence culturally far closer to the US than India has been. India has already lost tens of thousands of jobs to this Pacific Ocean nation.
In 2007, India had over 3 lakh call agents, the Philippines had barely half that number
Today, India and the Philippines both have 3.5 lakh workers each in voice BPO South Africa, the Caribbean, South America, Australia and Ireland emerging as other major voice destinations Indian call centres moving into non-voice areas or higher-end voice-based services
Telemarketing clearly on decline
India had over 3 lakh call agents in 2007 when the Philippines had just half of that. Today, India and the Philippines have an equal strength of 3.5 lakh people in voice BPO.
In the furthest reaches of India's rural heartland, the cellphone is bringing something that television, radio and even newspapers couldn't deliver: Instant access to music, information, entertainment, news and even worship.
Despite its rapid modernization, many of India's 750,000 villages remain isolated except for the cellphone reception that now blankets almost the entire country after a decade of rapid expansion by operators.
So in villages that don't receive any FM radio stations, people have begun calling a number that has a recording of Bollywood tunes and listening to it on their headsets.
This primitive cellular "radio" service was used by close to 20 million Indians last year, phone company executives estimate.
"I call it the poor man's iTunes," says Mahesh Prasad, president of Reliance Communications Ltd., one of India's largest cellular companies. "A villager waiting for a bus has nothing to do. When he wants to kill some time, this is the only entertainment media available."
The cricket fan without a television or radio can dial up and listen to the latest match live on his phone. Bharti Airtel Ltd., India's largest cell company by subscribers, has a special service that calls hundreds of thousands of farmers every day with recorded messages of weather reports and advice about crops.
Tata Teleservices has a service which lets farmers use their cellphones to control the pumps that water their crops.
SMS rates are set to crash, with telecom watchdog Trai reconsidering its longstanding policy of non-interference.
Following an expose by TOI on November 5 that SMS tariffs are 50 to 100 times higher than what it costs service providers, a top Trai official said, ``We are going to issue a consultation paper to review telecom tariffs within 20 days to a month.''
Consumers can expect substantial relief in SMS tariffs latest by March. The official said the move would have come sooner had the regulator not had its hands full with a consultation process on 2G spectrum.
The now inevitable tumbling of SMS rates has important implications for data usage. At present, SMS forms less than 5% of total revenue for mobile operators.
The widespread proliferation of texting is expected to spin off into far higher levels of internet usage. Experts confirm that a crash in SMS tariffs could be the first step to generating demand-side pressure for wireless broadband access.
The cost of an SMS is a fraction of a paisa. This is because an average SMS consists of 1KB data, which takes a fraction of a second for transportation and termination. This revelation by TOI knocked the bottom out of claims that India has among the lowest telecom tariffs in the world.
Trai has so far refused to regulate rates under the belief that competitive markets were at work and tariffs reflect costs. However, in the SMS arena, competition has clearly failed to move prices closer to costs. The practice of pricing SMSs high has been prevalent for several years while Trai has chosen to look the other way. This, despite the facts stating otherwise in Trai's own cost data from its IUC regulation of August 2006.
Alert issued about two new viruses that can steal passwords
Cyber Space has again been hit by two new viruses which can cause heavy damage. One of the virus named as Bredolab is circulating widely through spam mails comes from the family of Trojan downloaders which downloads and installs rogue anti-virus programmes onto the infected computers about which the user has no knowledge.
This virus comes to the victim through mails with subjects like Facebook password reset confirmation, UPS invoice, Western Union Money Transfer available to withdraw'.
Also this virus installs password stealers into the infected systems and keeps sending data from the infected computer which could be important files containing classified information about the user like his bank account details, identity details and other important things. Once this information is leaked from the infected computer it can lead to heavy losses for the user as his account details and passwords can be used for phishing or his identity details can help people involved in making these viruses hack into their mail account and misuse it.
Few months back, email accounts of two senior doctors from the city was hacked into and was further misused by the hacker to send emails to people in the contact list of the doctors asking for monetary help through money transfer in a foreign country.
Aimed at tightening procedures and safeguards to monitor and intercept data to prevent cybercrimes, the Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, became effective today. The Act was passed by both the Houses of Parliament in December last year and was notified in February this year.
Besides monitoring and interception, the amended Act also deals with the appointment of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, which deals with computer security and situations arising from cyber attacks.
“A rapid increase in the use of computer and internet has given rise to new forms of crimes like sending offensive emails and multimedia messages, child pornography, cyberterrorism, publishing sexually explicit materials in electronic form, video voyeurism, e-commerce frauds like cheating by personation etc. So, penal provisions were required to be included in the Information Technology Act, 2000,” the government said in a statement today.
When floated for public feedback this May, the draft amendments (particularly Section 69A) had stirred up a hornets’ nest. Critics argued that the amendments gave the government blanket power to block news portals and other sites for ‘offensive’ content and could be abused.
The government, under Section 69A of the amended IT Act, can “block public access of any information generated, transmitted, received, stored or hosted in a computer resource” in the interest of sovereignty or integrity of India; defence of India; security of the state; friendly relations with foreign states; public order; and to prevent incitement to the commission of any cognisable offence relating to the above.
This is an effort to bring the world wide web to the grassroots. If all goes as planned, in the next three years, panchayats across the country will have a broadband connection for e-governance.
In its second term, the UPA government has concretised Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi's proposal to build Rajiv Gandhi Bharat Nirman Seva Kendra at every panchayat -- the lowest level elected local body in a three-tier system.
This will mean that villagers do not have to travel long distances to government offices for for petty jobs and will be able to skip the red-tape.
The Rs 28,000-crore (Rs 280 billion) scheme is the third biggest rural development scheme after National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (Rs 39,100 crore) and National Rural Livelihood Mission (Rs 10,000 crore). The kendra (centre) will be set up in a two-room building to be constructed in each of the 265,000 panchayats.
The state governments will provide the land,while the Centre will fund the infrastructure.
Once the kendras start functioning, the villagers would be able to check their National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme bank accounts, pay premium for health insurance scheme for below poverty line families and can get many other services through these centres.
Us Now takes a look at how this type of participation could transform the way that countries are governed. It tells the stories of the online networks whose radical self-organising structures threaten to change the fabric of government forever.
But government's draft National Policy for Electronic Accessibility offers some hope
Last month, Deepak Kumar (name changed on request), a visually-impaired businessman, logged on to check out for some information on the newly-created Rajya Sabha website.
Given the government's assurance this February that at least 50 important government websites would be made disabled-friendly and accessible, he should have faced no problems. However, there were accessibility problems galore.
For instance, there were inappropriate alternate texts, no means to control the moving content, missing form labels, and code (XHTML) that did not match the world wide web consortium (W3C) specifications -- all in violation of guidelines provided by the Indian government itself.
Moreover, links leading to external websites existed but users were not informed about the same in advance, thus creating more problems for disabled people. The very title for the homepage of the website "Rajya Sabha -- Parliament of India" failed to describe that it is the homepage.
The world over, as new websites are created, countries like the US, the UK, Canada and Australia have enacted legislation to make it mandatory for creators of web pages to follow the minimum standards for accessibility adopted by
Google Earth's got some competition now from the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), which today unveiled its beta version of Bhuvan (meaning earth in Sanskrit).
A web-based tool like Google Earth, Bhuvan promises to give better 3-D satellite imagery of India than is currently being offered by the US-based software giant plus a host of India-specific features like weather information and even administrative boundaries of all states and districts.
The tool would offer pictures of the globe, just like Google Earth, and navigable in the same way but currently has the best resolutions over the Indian sub-continent. It allows users to fly from space to street level, grab, spin and zoom down to any place.
It also provides tools for measuring, drawing, saving, printing and visualizing thematic information. The resolutions currently on offer are good enough to view a vehicle moving on a road quite clearly.
Bhuvan currently only offers images taken between one and three years ago even over India. It combines satellite imagery from various sensors onboard IRS (Indian Remote Sensing) satellites and transposes them on a 3-D globe. As it keeps updating its database with more recent and higher resolution images, Bhuvan eventually promises to offer real-time data and images.
Cyber police is watching Government can monitor, intercept or even block any online content including e-mail that it thinks is offensive or could threaten national security. Could lead to misuse.
Personal data up for grabs Government agencies can now demand users' personal data from internet service providers. Could lead to privacy issues and litigation.
Beware of e-mail/MMS/SMS jokes Exchange of messages/data that are "offensive, annoying or cause inconvenience" over any computing device will be treated as an offence. Open to interpretation.
Intermediaries are better off Service providers will not be held responsible for offensive content put up by websites, but will have to respond to state orders to block/ remove content within two hours. Could lead to technology issues.
Here's a wake-up call for those just digesting Pakistan's ban on the "slander" of its leaders via SMS or e-mail. It might just pay to be careful while exchanging a joke about national leaders in India too. Anything you send or receive through the Net will soon come under the scanner--if it even remotely resembles anything "offensive or against national security", you could well land up in jail. If the rules being drafted under the Information Technology (IT) Act come into force, the government will have sweeping new powers to monitor, intercept or even block any content--and also prosecute people.
Pretty soon, millions of Indian users will find that it's no longer easy to put up just about anything on the internet without bothering about it. A photograph, a joke or an innocent, honest comment on a contentious issue could prove to be troublesome depending on how a government agency interprets it.
Drafted under the broad umbrella of cyber security, the rules give teeth to a new law passed by the government late last year.
It changes the system of penalties for cyber offences and makes it easy for government agencies to seek any information, including users' personal data. This sudden extremism over Net activities stems from the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year, where internet and mobile technology was allegedly used to plan and execute the operation. India's action here is not isolated and follows a pattern among countries like US and China, who are targeting terror aided by the internet.
It's a long journey for the Information Technology (IT) Act 2008, passed sometime in February this year, and yet to be notified. The IT Act 2000, the first law to address the diverse legal issues emanating from India's phenomena IT growth, proceeded on a fundamental premise in trying to provide an omnibus law to cover e-governance, e-commerce, e-archiving, as well as the basic framework for cyber security and cyber crimes. The platform was deficient, as issues of cyber security, particularly in the context of the proliferation in internet transactions for goods and services, transfer of funds through banks, online credit card payments, which exposed and enhanced the scope of vulnerability to frauds and other crimes, were not addressed.
In response to this need for a proper law for electronic commerce, and the larger canvas of Fundamental Rights from the encroachment of cyberspace, in 2006 an Amendment Bill was introduced in the Parliament to provide for its integration into the legislative changes being implemented in other laws such as the Negotiable Instruments Act, the Indian Evidence Act, in recognition of the role of electronic media in the 21st century. Renamed as the IT Amendment Bill 2008, several changes were made to the initial recommendations and the draft passed by the two Houses of Parliament without any discussion thereon. Even in terms of media recognition, there was very little coverage of a law as controversial as this though there was a lot of spirited blogging, which could have far reaching implications on privacy rights of citizens.
To an extent, the Act is an updation of the IT Act 2000, differentiating application of digital and electronic signatures in relation to authentication and creation of documents. Definitions have also been introduced to include new technology in communication devices and systems of creation and transmission through various systems. The Act has sought to validate the concept of penalties, compensation and adjudication in dealing with what is popularly known as cyber crimes and in doing so Section 66 and 67 of the existing Act have been enacted.
From providing services to the developed world, the country is now shifting to cater to its own growing needs
With the US in recession, India's call centres have opened a new outsourcing frontier: India.
The shift is a sign of how India's flagship export industry is shifting from providing services to the developed world to catering to its own, quickly growing market. The Indian economy grew 6.7% for the fiscal ended March 31.
While outsourcing revenue from within India is still a tiny fraction of the global market--$12 billion (Rs57,360 crore) in 2008 out of $500 billion spent worldwide--it is expected to hit $95 billion by 2020, or nearly 15% of the expected global market, according to a recent McKinsey and Co. report. The overall global market for business process outsourcing will reach $640 billion in the same time, the report says. Indian outsourcers capture contracts from US clients largely by touting India's low wages and big cost savings. But at home, providing those lower costs means setting up offices in rural areas, where wages and property costs are lower than in its bigger cities.
"We cannot deliver and make money in the same way we make money for an international market," says Ananda Mukerji, chief executive of Firstsource Solutions Ltd, a Mumbai-based outsourcer.
In April 2007, his company opened a call centre in Hubli, a city of 800,000 people 370km northwest of Bangalore, India's outsourcing capital. Hubli is best known for its cotton and peanut farms.
But it is also a place where wages and rents are half of those in major cities such as Mumbai. A call centre worker who gets roughly $500 a month in Mumbai would earn $250 to $300 a month in Hubli.
IT professionals in this tech hub are battling the global downturn with the help of doctors. Living under the constant fear of losing their jobs or trauma of seeing their colleagues getting the pink slip, the techies are increasingly seeking medical help to survive what experts call the "layoff survivor syndrome".
The intensity of the syndrome could become severe when a team member working on a project is benched or sent out, a leading psychiatrist said.
"It's a mental situation where IT professionals who of late have seen their colleagues, who are often friends, too, being laid off," B.N. Gangadhar, professor of psychiatry at the premier National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS) here, said.
"First, it is the anxiety that the axe may fall upon them the next time and, secondly, a sense of remorse, with a tinge of guilt that they have survived, whereas their colleagues sitting next to them have lost jobs," Gangadhar said.
Two million people were employed in the Indian IT and BPO industry in 2007-08, according to the IT industry body Nasscom. The BPO sector employed more than 7 lakh persons.
"These are bad times. Recently two of my colleagues, who are also close friends, were fired. I am feeling terrible after the episode," said Sundar Gopal working with a reputed Indian IT company.
UNITES-Professionals (Union of Information Technology-Enabled Services Professionals), says there is no clear estimate of the job loss in these sectors in the wake of the global economic meltdown.
Thirty-five-year old Sampath Tilak Vegi first started working on the Lehman Brothers account a few years ago. At that time, he had no idea how closely his fortunes would get entwined with that of the now defunct investment bank. The tango started almost two years ago. Vegi was living the great Indian IT dream. He had 10 years' experience. He was working for TCS, India's largest IT services company in Bangalore, servicing a marquee customer. He had just received a 25% pay hike and was contemplating buying a house in his hometown, Visakhapatnam. Life was good.
A few continents away, the New York-headquartered Lehman Brothers had just posted record revenues and profits, and was handling assets of over $275 billion. At that time, Vegi was sitting on multiple job offers. One was from American outsourcing giant EDS and the other from Wipro, India's second largest IT company. Both offered to pay him substantially more than what he was earning at TCS. But EDS was willing to pay a little more than Wipro.
Multiple job offers and generous pay hikes were nothing unusual in the IT industry. Talent was hard to come by. Companies had to pay plenty in cash, bonuses, perks and stock options to retain existing employees, and attract new hires by the thousands. New contracts from US clients were flowing in easily and IT companies had a simple formula for success: they could grow as much as they could hire. They often behaved like sharks in a feeding frenzy. They hired indiscriminately.
Vegi chose to accept Wipro's offer ahead of EDS. "I thought my job would be more secure with an Indian company," he recalls. Soon after, on September 14, Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy. In three months, the bank would be just a footnote in financial history. When Vegi heard the news, he was in Vizag for his housewarming ceremony. "Good I moved out of that account," he thought. But he had no inkling of the catastrophe awaiting him the next day.
On September 15, Vegi was summoned to his supervisor's cabin. He had been a part of Wipro's `free pool' (the bench, IT industry lingo for people without any work to do) for a few months. "The supervisor asked me to resign as there were no projects," recalls Vegi. If Vegi were to be assigned a project during his notice period, the supervisor promised to reinstate him. The supervisor then pushed his laptop across the table and asked Vegi to type out his resignation letter. Flustered, Vegi asked for time.
Imagine being thrown into jail for an innocuous Tweet. Or being sacked by your employer for an innocent status message. Worse, your wife files for divorce based on on what you put up on Facebook!
```Hey, this is Andrew calling. Do you have a minute? Can I talk you through the new features of your card?'' The voice of a Gurgaon call centre employee, thinly disguised as American by rolling the Rs, addressing a customer in Iowa, may become a thing of the past. The traditional voice calls that tried to sweettalk Americans into buying everything from credit cards to computers and which catapulted India to fame as the world's back-office, is fading out.
Alert issued about two new viruses that can steal passwords
Last month, Deepak Kumar (name changed on request), a visually-impaired businessman, logged on to check out for some information on the newly-created Rajya Sabha website.
Here's a wake-up call for those just digesting Pakistan's ban on the "slander" of its leaders via SMS or e-mail. It might just pay to be careful while exchanging a joke about national leaders in India too. Anything you send or receive through the Net will soon come under the scanner--if it even remotely resembles anything "offensive or against national security", you could well land up in jail. If the rules being drafted under the Information Technology (IT) Act come into force, the government will have sweeping new powers to monitor, intercept or even block any content--and also prosecute people.
It's a long journey for the Information Technology (IT) Act 2008, passed sometime in February this year, and yet to be notified. The IT Act 2000, the first law to address the diverse legal issues emanating from India's phenomena IT growth, proceeded on a fundamental premise in trying to provide an omnibus law to cover e-governance, e-commerce, e-archiving, as well as the basic framework for cyber security and cyber crimes. The platform was deficient, as issues of cyber security, particularly in the context of the proliferation in internet transactions for goods and services, transfer of funds through banks, online credit card payments, which exposed and enhanced the scope of vulnerability to frauds and other crimes, were not addressed.
