The Supreme Court of India has pulled up Internet companies Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft and WhatsApp about videos on rape, child pornography being uploaded, the Economic Times reports. The companies were required to submit affidavits regarding the number of complaints they received for the year till August 31. The court heard sent to complaint to chief justice HL Dattu by Hyderabad-based NGO Prajwala run by activist Sunitha Krishnan, along with two rape videos in a pen drive. Meanwhile, the NGO had mooted the idea of a partnership with the ministry of home affairs with YouTube and WhatsApp to ensure that such videos are not uploaded. The NGO also wanted a national sex offenders' register that will have details of persons convicted for offences like eve-teasing, stalking, molestation and other sexual assaults. Note that YouTube does have a mechanism for flagging content which might be offensive and does take videos down but it will be difficult in the case of WhastApp as it functions as a messaging service and is end-to-end encrypted. Because of the encryption, communication between two users will be impossible to read by others including WhatsApp. This means requests for data by governments will be technically impossible to comply with. Meanwhile, the advocates appearing for Google, Microsoft and Yahoo argued that it was technically not feasible to block all keywords, as they mentioned in a previous case on sex determination ads. Note the first time In December 2015, the court sought the central government’s view on setting up a pan-India agency which would…
