The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s (MeitY) new directions to virtual private network (VPN) service providers to store data of Indian users for up to five years, may move to oppose the policy.
New Directives
- On 28 April, 2022, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (Cert-In) issued new directives, that require Virtual Private Network (VPN) providers to store user data for five years.
- Directions were issued under sub-section (6) of section 70B of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
- Under the new directions, VPN providers will need to store validated customer names, their physical addresses, email ids, phone numbers, and the reason they are using the service, along with the dates they use it and their “ownership pattern”.
- In addition, CERT-In is also asking VPN providers to keep a record of the IP and email addresses that the customer uses to register the service, along with the timestamp of registration.
- VPN providers will have to store all IP addresses issued to a customer and a list of IP addresses that its customers generally use.
Concerns
- The list of data points that the government has directed to store is quite exhaustive as storing these data points for such a long period will cost enormously to VPN vendors since they would have to store these in the cloud.
- Moreover, these guidelines would also require them to change their product which will be a major nuisance for the VPN providers.
What is virtual private network (VPN)
- A virtual private network, better known as a VPN, gives you online privacy and anonymity by creating a private network from a public internet connection.
- VPNs mask your internet protocol (IP) address so your online actions are virtually untraceable.
- Most important, VPN services establish secure and encrypted connections to provide greater privacy than even a secured Wi-Fi hotspot.
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