Indians will soon no longer be able to browse the internet anonymously. As of June 27, VPNs (Virtual Private Networks), which generally guarantee the total protection of their data, will be obliged to keep these for five years and to transmit them to the State, if the latter requests them. .
One of the government’s goals of “the greatest democracy in the world” is clearly to prevent its population from accessing social networks, access to which is moreover prohibited. India is thus taking a new step towards censorship, by announcing a new directive: as of June 27, the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN) will now have access to the data of the very many customers of VPN solutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, cloud storage services, data centers and even wallet providers.
All these structures will have to keep all the data of their customers for a period of five years: identity, IP and email addresses, but also postal address and telephone number may therefore be transmitted to CERT-IN, if this State office of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technologies demands it.
Read also: The big lie of the collection of “anonymized” health data
This measure will be problematic for Indians who used VPNs in particular to browse anonymously and access content that is in principle prohibited from viewing from their country. Many local VPN providers may well have to go out of business, as they will no longer be able to guarantee anonymity to their customers.