In a bid to tighten the security and keep the government information confidential against recent cyberspying attempts by US worldwide, government of India is mulling to stop the use of Gmail for official communication by its users.
The move in my opinion comes against the backdrop the US Surveillance program PRISM whose revealations were made by US National Security Agency contractor Snowden, currently seeking asylum in Russia.
Edward Snowden disclosed documents about US government getting direct access to personal accounts of millions of Internet users via emails and chat messages from companies like Google, Facebook and Apple. It also has access to network infrastructure in many countries, he added. This threatens the national security. As such, the government has considered the decision.
Some known faces in India Government like Milind Deora (Minister of State for Communications and IT) & Kruparni Killi use Gmail service and have their email IDs listed in government portals as their official email.
J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology.
“Gmail data of Indian users resides in other countries as the servers are located outside. Currently, we are looking to address this in the government domain, where there are large amounts of critical data”.
This means government is planning to send notifications to its employs to dump email services use that have their servers located elsewhere and use the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre.
Meanwhile, Google India spokeswoman cleared that it has not received any formal notification from the Indian Government side and hence it cannot comment on speculation.
Source – Times of India
