SC bats for the rights of Internet users

More and more problems make their way to the court

The Supreme Court has made it clear that it wants to make Internet companies liable under Indian laws.

Supreme Court judge Justice Dipak Misra recently described the Internet as a “world which is invisible.”

Judges are grappling with the seemingly “infinite and seamless connectivity” of the Internet with more and more problems dealing with the myriad facets of the virtual world make their way to the Supreme Court.

So far, the Supreme Court has made it clear that it wants to protect the rights of the citizen and make Internet companies liable under Indian laws. But the court is against imposing any general online ban. This, it said in a recent order, would curtail the right of the “genuine information-seeker to gain knowledge and information from the Internet.”

A slew of cases, ranging from a privacy challenge to a 2016 policy entered into between WhatsApp and Facebook to posting of online sexual videos to the presence of pre-natal sex determination advertisements on the Internet to the safety of online cash transactions, have grabbed the Supreme Court’s attention and time.

Objectionable content

These cases have seen the ordinary man engage Internet giants like Facebook, WhatsApp, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft in litigation in the Supreme Court. These petitions demand that the Internet giants should also be made liable for the objectionable and illegal content posted online.

Counsel for Prajwala, the NGO which moved the court about how social media is misused by criminals to post and share sexual offence videos of women and children, said Internet companies should be held responsible for such materials finding their way into their online domains.

PCPNDT Act

In a separate case, Dr. Sabu Mathew George took on Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for hosting pre-natal sex determination advertisements on their search engines in violation of Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) (PCPNDT) Act of 1994.

While the Internet companies have repeatedly said it was impossible to forestall a person from posting objectionable content online, these cases have led the court to order Internet companies to set up in-house expert bodies to scour the Internet and remove objectionable and illegal content.

Nodal officers

The litigation has further triggered the government to appoint nodal officers at State levels to keep tabs on the Net for offensive material. The government’s officers would alert the search engines, who are liable to remove the objectionable material within the next 36 hours.

Again, the ‘right to be left alone’ in the virtual world is gaining prominence as a subject of litigation in the Supreme Court.

A Constitution Bench of five judges has started hearing two law students who have challenged the 2016 contract entered into by WhatsApp to give Facebook access to information and personal details shared by millions of its users is a violation of their privacy and free speech.

Senior advocate K.K. Venugopal has said that the case would see a re-look of two Constitution Bench decisions — the 1954 eight-judge Bench verdict in M.P. Sharma’s case and the six-judge Bench judgment of 1962 in Kharak Singh on the nature of right to privacy. Both judgments had categorically rejected the existence of privacy as a guaranteed right under Article 21 (right to life) of the Constitution.

Mr. Venugopal suggested that a nine-judge Bench hear the case.

The government has also conveyed the urgency to protect privacy and personal data on the Internet. Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi informed the Supreme Court that the government is working post-haste on “overarching data protection” laws to protect individual’s online privacy and ‘right to be forgotten’.