After the major leak of the US Government's surveillance program 'PRISM' last week, several Indian ISPs have now asked the Indian Government to insist foreign Internet companies like Facebook and Google to setup local servers in India, in order to provide their respective services in the country, reports The Hindu Business Line. Speaking to the publication, Rajesh Chharia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) has told that several ISPs have expressed concerns over the privacy of its respective users and have sought immediate steps to protect them. ISPs have also asked the government to mandate foreign companies to store data from users within the country in these local servers, so that the data is not available to any other foreign intelligence agency. The privacy issue is quite strange, considering that India has recently set up a similar system called 'Central Monitoring System', through which government agencies can access all telecommunications and Internet communications in India and the ISPs had not raised any privacy issues about their subscribers then. Furthermore, there is no privacy law in the country as of now, thereby paving the way for a possible misuse of the system in the future. If the government is successful in forcing foreign companies to setup local servers, we are a bit concerned about the amount of data to which the government agencies will be privy to, since there is still not enough information on Central Monitoring System like whose data is being collected, how the collected data will be used, and how long the data will be retained among…
