New law on VPN services to be implemented in India
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, India’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has asked VPN operators in India to collect information such as – names, email addresses and IP addresses of the client is used to connect to the web. The national agency that oversees computer security has also asked companies to maintain data for at least five years and provide information to authorities upon request, the report said.
CERT-In explained that the new law is important to tackle cybercrime and protect “India’s sovereignty or integrity” and the nation’s security. The report adds that the agency has also said that the new rules will be implemented from September 25.
Why VPN providers decided to take down their servers in India
According to the report, withdrawal VPN companies and internet rights groups have stated that by collecting such data, the companies will “invade user privacy and restrict online speech”. Some digital groups also implied that the new rules are “more typical than those applied in China or Russia” and cannot be found in democratic countries.
A spokesman for NordVPN, which has also decided to shut down its servers in India, said that these rules are often used by authoritarian governments to gain more control over citizens. their. “If democracies follow a similar path, it has the potential to affect their privacy as well as their freedom of expression,” she added.
Several other VPN services have also recently shut down servers in India. These providers include – US-based Private Internet Access and IPVanish, based in Canada TunnelBearExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands and is based in Lithuania Surfsharkthe report adds.
In addition, ExpressVPN has also refused to participate in “the Indian government’s efforts to restrict internet freedom”. Private Internet Access has complained that the government’s move “seriously undermines the online privacy of Indian residents.”
However, Indian users will be able to connect to VPN servers in other countries. Users in Russia and China who have to take the same approach as servers operating in these countries also need VPN companies that comply with the same laws.
What is Apple? icloud Private forwarding
The report mentions that the new law even applies to Apple’s iCloud Private Relay, which is also a VPN service used only for The hunt Browser. The iCloud Private Relay system is designed in a way that allows neither party to process authorized user data to complete information about both who the user is and what they are trying to access the report notes. .
According to the report, Apple’s Private Relay uses state-of-the-art transport and encryption to forward traffic from a user’s device through Apple and its partners’ infrastructure before sending it to the destination website. .
However, the company has yet to comment on its plans to offer VPN services in India and is expected to announce its decision soon. Furthermore, the new rule even applies to cloud storage services, however, in this case, it won’t have much of a practical impact on Apple, the report asserts. The company keeps a copy of your decryption key because iCloud does not use end-to-end encryption. So it can easily comply with government requests for information.
