Sunday, 12 February 2012
About | Contact Us | Careers | Feed
RESOURCE CENTRE
Tax and Revenue Management: A government’s lifeblood
IT has provided the opportunities for governments to remodel the entire process of tax collection over the last decade. It is, however, a continuously evolving process and governments the world over need to constantly upgrade their tax systems to optimise their revenue workflows.
Unlocking Public Value
A recent SAP study confirmed that those organisations which adopt best practices in the areas of scope and adoption, process standardisation, technology and customer governance, do perform better, and do so as their best practice maturity increases.
Governments and Socialising
The advent of social media has seen governments hopping onto the bandwagon in a bid to further engage citizens.
Advertisement
Follow us on Twitter 
| Join us on 
Central Government, Government Security, Policy
India targets Google and Skype on data security
First BlackBerry. Now Google and Skype. The government of India not only wants BlackBerry to build data centres within its borders so that its intelligence agencies can more easily monitor communications. It wants Google and Skype to do the same.
Home Secretary G. K. Pillai said yesterday (Wednesday 1st September) that the government would be sending notices to the two firms, requesting that they set up servers in India.
Pillai’s ultimatum is partly motivated by concerns that the services could be used by militants.
However, Skype and Google both told FutureGov that they were yet to receive any word from the government.
A Google India spokesperson also refused to speculate on whether the company would go the way of its China operation, which ceased operations in the country in March.
In India, around 24 million people – many of them government employees - use its gmail service, from which users can now make phone calls. Orkut, Google’s social networking service which has not enjoyed much success outside of South Asia, now has 19.9 million users in India.
Skype, which also has a large user base in the country, was on the receiving end of a crackdown by the Indian government in 2006. Local businesses were advised not to use the internet telephony service, the government citing security risks and a loss of tax revenue.
The firm would not comment on the latest news.
“We have not received any notification from the [Indian] government and hence are unable to comment further at this stage,” Skype’s Asia Pacific PR Director Eunice Lim told FutureGov.
The news comes just two days after the expiry of a deadline for Research In Motion, the maker of BlackBerry, to give the Indian authorities access to its data traffic. The company has been given a further 60 days to comply.
But some firms are playing ball.
Nokia, which counts India as its second largest market after China, has bowed to the government’s demands to install a server in India to handle communications for its messaging service by November.
Other telco providers are likely to be targeted by the government in due course.
The Home Ministry said on Monday (30th August 2010): “Any communication through the telecom networks should be accessible to the law enforcement agencies and all telecom service providers including third parties have to comply with this.”
Rate this article
Add your comment
Most highly rated
Better learning with web 2.0 and virtual worlds
In a visit to Ngee Ann Secondary School yesterday (22 July), FutureGov found students deeply ...
Students take a green stance with social media
Ngee Ann Secondary School’s students are on a bid to “change the world” with ...
Will Facebook profiles replace govt web sites?
It’s all the rage for ministries and agencies to have a Facebook pages these ...
2 Comments
On 2 September 2010 s.ravikumar wrote:
wat's wrong? that wll solve the problem & serve ur users.
On 5 September 2010 Wan wrote:
This is intimidating! First, Blackberry, now Google and Skype? More and more web 2.0 social networks are facing daunting task in facing with policies and guidelines being enforced by a respective country. Most governments would set a high standard of regulation framework requirements to anyone who wants to bring in web 2.0 tools to respective country.