Data safety first cybersecurity rule
Crimes in cyberspace in India are at a point of explosion. Going by the information in Parliament, a staggering 16 lakh cybercrimes were reported in the last three years though just 32,000 FIRs were registered. That should be cause enough for worry. From 12,317 cases in 2016, the cybercrime numbers surged past the 52,000 mark in 2021. Of the 50,035 cases registered in the pandemic year of 2020, a fifth
was categorised as fraud under the Indian Penal Code, and the other 5,000-plus cases were logged as identity theft as per the Information Technology Act. Besides, online scams, OTP frauds and phishing are at a point of inflexion. Stories of both gullible and sensible users falling prey to online fraud are all over the place. This is the murkier side of the digital age.
Let’s look at the sunny side of a country that aspires to be a $5 trillion economy. The number of Indians engaged in online transactions stands at a staggering 346 million. The population of the US in this case is a tad lower at 331 million. A report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India states that from the current number of active internet users number, i.e., 692 million, India will breach the 900-million mark by 2025. With the deluge of digitalisation comes its downside. Virtual private network service provider NordVPN analysed the data of 5 million users on the cybercrime marketplaces and found about 12% of user data belonged to Indians.
Despite a bouquet of law enforcement agencies put in place by the Indian government and the states, online offences have shown no signs of relenting. Much of it is indisputably linked to the theft of personal data stored across devices, applications, sites and other platforms, which find their way to the cybercrime space in time and at throwaway prices. But most of the state agencies responsible for dealing with such crimes are ill-equipped in terms of both domain knowledge and resources. Equally abysmally low is the level of awareness about such crimes among the vast swathes of users.
Come to think of it, much of the country’s internet usage is driven by rural India. The war against cybercrimes must start with brazen data theft of what the draft Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 calls ‘data principals’. Your personal data is not everybody’s data, and the Centre has a responsibility to
ensure it.