Vigilance @ Cyber Cafes

Remember I wrote about how I had to use a cyber café a few weeks back and the momentous discovery I made there about carelessly shutting down Facebook? Well, I had another experience there that I would like to share with you all today.

For the very first time, the cyber café manager checked my id and entered my name, contact number and time of entry in a register, before allotting me a computer terminal! I was pleasantly surprised by this safety procedure. He explained that the Pune Police had issued directives to all cyber cafe owners and PCO operators to be vigilant in view of the increase in anti-national and cyber criminal activities.

There are about 3,000 cyber cafes in Pune, which is just one of the hundreds of cities and towns in India. You can only therefore grasp at the wide scope available to anti-social elements. They have been using these cafes to steal the identities of people, enter their social networking sites to malign their characters, stalk them and in extreme cases, take their obsession offline to lure them into an in-person meeting. They often send abusive, explicit mails, morphed photographs, make the private details of their victims public and try to scare the victims to submit to their will. It is difficult for the cyber police to lay their hands on these cyber criminals, as they cannot establish their identities.

Cyber hackers are having a field day while unsuspecting people are silently suffering from different forms of abuse. True, a few hackers have been caught, but the majority go scot-free due to lack of substantial evidence.

So needless to say, when I came across this story that confirms the efforts by the Pune Police, it added to my general sense of belief in the system. And while it is only a drop in the ocean, it’s a very good start. Consider this excerpt from the story:

“Assistant Police Inspector Dr Sanjay D Tungar from the Cyber Crime Cell said that the idea is for police officials to understand how to survey a crime scene and preservation of evidence, identification and handling of digital evidence, understanding computer hardware and data storage, among other things.”

Now, the use of public internet cafes will hopefully be better monitored so that along with the IP address of the computer, the police can acquire the name and contact details of the user at a particular time.

I am sure this move will drastically bring down the misuse of cyber cafes, as long as the café owners continue to remain vigilant. It will also allow mothers like me to sleep better at night (the smallest hint of any kind of threat to my children triggers my insomnia, you know).

My thanks and compliments to the Pune Police for this effort. May the movement spread across the nation.

Anindita
Follow me on Twitter @Cybermum_India

Tags: cybercrime, Cybermum India, cybersafety, Pune Police, security

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