The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Fertile ground for harassing women

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Mar 04, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Fertile ground for harassing women

By Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI, MARCH 3. Online discussion boards have become fertile ground for harassing women. The city's Cyber Crime Branch say in recent months they have received more complaints regarding obscene calls, e-mails and SMSs than ever before. Some of the complaints have been tracked back to messages posted on online discussion forums.

Last month, the Cyber Crime Cell arrested an Adyar-based web designer on charges of posting photographs of two women on an online discussion board along with a message that they were available for soliciting. The women continuously received calls for a few days before they decided to take up the issue with the police.

Last year, a Mumbai-based youth Suhas Katti was convicted for harassing a city woman by posting obscene messages of her on a yahoo group message board. Here again, the woman had named Katti as a suspect and tracking him down became easy.

However, the real problem arises when police do not have any clues about the offender. The police do not rule out the possibility where the offenders could log on through Internet parlours. When that happens, they are just chasing ghosts.

Customer registries

Nobody knows exactly how many Internet parlours are there in the city because a majority of them are not registered with any of the government agencies. According to one of the Internet parlour owners in Perambur: "All it takes to get started are a few computers and a roof above. We have approached the Chennai Corporation for licences but the officials have just turned us back."

Even by conservative estimates, there must over 1,000 Internet parlours in the city. Fly-by-night operators, who wind up once they have made some profits, run a number of them.

While restrictions on uploading photographs or monitoring the messages may be impractical, experts feel that the bare minimum that could be demanded from Internet parlours is maintenance of a customer registry. In Maharashtra and Karnataka, police have made it mandatory for all Internet parlours to maintain records of their customers for at least a year.

Cyber law consultant Na.Vijayashankar suggests that Internet parlours in the city should not wait for the police to issue any regulations. "Internet parlours are defined as `intermediaries' under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and its owners must understand they are liable under cyber crime cases. It will be better if they adopt safeguards before police come up with strict regulations."

Difficulties

An Internet parlour owner from Anna Nagar explained the difficulties in enforcing regulations. "I do not allow viewing videos in my parlours. But there is little I can do to prevent viewing images on online discussion forums. Also, it is virtually impossible for anyone to claim that there can be a total cutting off of all pornographic sites because increasingly the images and video files are finding their way into discussion groups and other portals (websites) that have several people meeting and chatting online."

However, there are still a few Internet parlours that maintain customer registries. A spokesperson of Satyam said his company offered incentives for customers while maintaining a registry for its `Iway' Internet parlours. "We encourage customers to become members. The attractive tariffs at an iWay are applicable only for members. While becoming a member, the customer necessarily needs to fill up an online registration form which captures some basic personal details." Some of the iWays also employ women as system administrators.

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