Court wonders why firms are shying away from building one SC wants Web firewall on sex crimes
The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed internet search engines Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and besides social media applications such as Facebook and Whatsapp to come out with a “firewall”, similar to the one developed in China, to automatically prevent the uploading of any explicit sexual contents such as video clips of rapes and other cases of sexual violence.
A bench comprising Justice Madan B. Lokur and Justice Uday Lalit has granted three weeks’ time to the search engines and social media websites to spell out how the mechanism will work.
The Bench did not agree with the submissions advanced on behalf of Google and others that they would remove the objectionable content withing 48 to 72 hours — saying there was no need for such a firewall.
The Bench also wondered why the operators were shying away from developing such a mechanism, when China could do so.
Earlier, counsel Aparna Bhat for petitioner NGO Prajwala said that China had successfully developed a “firewall” to prevent offensive material from going online. No wonder, she said, “the technology had gained the sobriquet, Great Firewall of China”.
Senior counsel Abhishek Singhvi, appearing for Google, told the court that any such auto block mechanism would seriously hurt search material for research and other legal purposes. For instance, he said that if any auto-block method was developed to say, block a phrase such as “gang-rape”, then even legal and archived information on films like Damini would get erased forever. Damini, revolved around the gang rape of a domestic help.
Melbourne, Feb. 1: An Indian-origin woman has become the sixth victim of an “intentional” road rampage, 10 days after she was critically injured in the accident at a busy street here in Australia’s second-largest city.
Bhavita Patel, 33, who worked as a director at a global accounting firm in Melbourne, died in hospital on Monday night after her family decided to turn off her life support following the fatal accident on January 20.
Doctors tried to save Patel, but her condition did not improve and she lay unresponsive in hospital, a report said.
Patel was mowed down by a speeding car which rammed into several pedestrians, killing five people.