Last month, Government of India issued two notifications titled: ‘E-mail Policy of Government of India’ and ‘Policy on use of Information Technology resources of Government of India’, wherein usage of external email clients such as Gmail and Yahoo has been banned for all government employees.
Along with that, the new Internet usage policy informs that all Govt. employee’s email, Internet and Social Media usage would be monitored, and messages/texts/information found in their inboxes can be deleted.
Email services provided by NIC shall only be used for all official communication.
Government officials have been prohibited from posting “offensive, threatening, defamatory, bullying, racist, hateful, harassing, obscene or sexist” content on social media portals such as Facebook and Twitter.
Considering that nation’s security is at risk, and there can be no compromise on this issue, we welcome this step.
However, what resulted from this notification is certainly absurd as a BJP MP has now demanded that Gmail and Yahoo Mail be now declared ‘untrustworthy’ for all Indian citizens.
Tarun Vijay, BJP MP, while congratulating the Indian Government for coming out with clear & transparent policy on the email and Internet usage, added, “If use of these mail services, who park all their data in foreign lands, is not good for government officials, how can it be good for the common citizens?”
He demanded that Gmail and Yahoo should be declared as untrusted for all Indian citizens as he said, “These email services should be declared ‘untrustworthy’ for common citizens also.”
If we believe Tarun Vijay, then the whole country is at risk by using not only Gmail and Yahoo but also social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. As per him, the government should ban social media usage in Government offices, and there should be a Central Cyber Space Command Centre to monitor and check all social media posts created inside the country. He suggested a plan to create India’s very own social media networks as a replacement of Facebook and Twitter.
He said, “Enemy does not need only hard military data, but also depends heavily on our social behavioral patterns, purchase patterns etc which are analyzed through master card and Visa card usages by the common citizen.”
Gmail, founded by world’s biggest Internet company Google was founded in 2004, and right now 500 million people all over the world use Gmail as their primary email client. The Gmail App on Google Playstore has been downloaded 1 billion times, and as per a study, 26% of all Americans use Gmail from their office computers.
Yahoo Mail is ranked after Gmail in terms of popularity as close to 250 million people use it daily.
Google and Yahoo haven’t responded to the demand of declaring them ‘untrustworthy’ for Indian citizens.