Government not decided on getting Facebook, Twitter servers in India

Communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad yesterday said that the government had not yet decided to establish servers of websites such as Facebook and Twitter in India.

He, however, added that the government would keep in touch with the social networking majors regularly to resolve issues related to handling of unlawful content on the internet.

"The government has not decided to get servers of popular social networking sites, like hike, Facebook, Twitter, etc, established within the country," communications and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.

The minister said, the government regularly interacted with all stakeholders including social media providers to resolve the issues arising from time to time.

He added that security agencies were facing difficulties while dealing with encrypted communications provided by various service providers.

He added that world over, several service providers were providing services like WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Skype, Yahoo, Gmail for sharing audio, video, image, email, data and accessing other web services anytime and anywhere in a secure manner.

"At times these services may also be used by anti-national and criminal elements, which pose a security threat," the minister said.

He added that all telecom service providers including internet service providers had been directed by the government to provide the lawful interception and monitoring facilities to the security agencies for all services including WhatsApp, Viber, etc.

Prasad said people all around the world benefited from these internet-based services.

''…there are multifarious aspects involved in security enforcement agencies getting such encrypted communication in readable format such as technical, international relationship, legal and regulatory policy, commercial and security requirements etc,'' Prasad added.