Social media & Cyber Law in India

By - Roushni Singh

B.A.LL.B 1st Year

 What is Social Media?

The Oxford Dictionary defines social media as a website and applications that enable and share content to participate in social networking.

Through, this the individual interacts to each other virtually and sometime they communicate through the internet. Here individual share his content and photos regarding his life, thought, feeling, occasions, events, day today happening etc.

But it has also became source of cybercrime, where user of social media is becoming victim of cybercrime. User often post their personal information on social media, which is being watched by the people, and that where cybercrime begins. Hacker extract and gather all the sensitive information regarding the user and use it for trapping them in world of cybercrime. Hacker steals the sensitive and important information of people to use them to blackmail. People are often negligent about their network, they allow anyone to become part of their social media life, where they post their details about their family, life, office, partner, work etc. But this information is use as knowing about the person and help hackers to use technique to grab user in web of their crime. After knowing about user, they gave the greed of lottery and ask all the detail about their bank account to transfer money, after knowing all the personal information of their bank account, they easily take out their money. And this is how crime committed. Sometime, hackers hacked the social media account of user and use it for their own purpose like asking money from the user relatives, threatening the other user and blackmailing them to fulfil their purpose by hiding their identity. Such crime has reach to such extend where it steals the secret information of any organisation and person, which is not supposed to be exposed and known by anyone. But this is being illegally utilized by hackers for their malpractice.

 

Cyber law:

Now let’s come to the law which provide protection to the people and help them to overcome the problem of cyber crime, if they have become victim of cybercrime. Laws protect the people that’s why law was enacted for the cyber crime.

   

IT (information technology) act 2000, deal with cybercrime law in India. There are certain provisions mention under this act. Even it classify different type of cyber crime and their law related to it. Cyber crime can be of different type and laws apply even varies from each other.  

 

Some of the law regarding it are as follow, which deal with this crime.

 

·         Section 65 - It deals with crime tempering with computer source document.

·         Section 66 - It deals with hacking with computer system.

·         Section 67 - It deals with  the  publishing information about obscene in electronic form

·         Section 68 - It deals with failure to comply with orders.

·         Section 69 - failure to decrypt data.

·         Section 70 - Securing access or attempt to secure access to a protected system.

Conclusion:

The cases of cyber crime is rising day by day, it has become very difficult to control it and became easy for hackers to commit cybercrime. The root cause of such problem is none other then being much active on social media and sharing the personal information to all. So, people need to become more vigilant about cyber crime and they should be more alert, before they share something on social media. They must know that there each action is being noticed by any stranger, who can be a hacker too.  Though law provide protection but still it is better to not become victim of cybercrime.