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

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Mar 15, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Fertile ground for harassing women

By Karthik Subramanian

CHENNAI, MARCH 14. Online discussion boards have become fertile ground for harassing women. The city's Cyber Crime Branch says that in recent months it received more complaints of obscene calls, e-mail 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 took 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 about her on a Yahoo group board. The woman named Katti a suspect and tracking him down became easy.

However, the real problem arises when the police do not have any clues to the offender. They do not rule out the possibility of the offenders logging on through Internet parlours. When that happens, they are just chasing ghosts.

Customer registries

Nobody knows exactly how many Internet parlours are 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 at Perambur: "All it takes to get started are a few computers and a roof. We have approached the Chennai Corporation for licences but the officials have just turned us back."

Even by conservative estimates, there must be 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, the 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 regulation. "Internet parlours are defined as `intermediaries' under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the owners must understand they are liable under cyber crime cases. It will be better if they adopt safeguards before the 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 (web sites) 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 to 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 to 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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