BANGALORE/NEW DELHI: The government will soon ask all its employees to stop using Google’s Gmail for official communication, a move intended to increase security of confidential government information after revelations of widespread cyberspying by the US.
A senior official in the ministry of communications and information technology said the government plans to send a formal notification to nearly 5 lakh employees barring them from email service providers such as Gmail that have their servers in the US, and instead asking them to stick to the official email service provided by India’s National Informatics Centre.
“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,” said J Satyanarayana, secretary in the department of electronics and information technology.
Snowden fallout
The move comes in the wake of revelations by former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the US government had direct access to large amounts of personal data on the internet such as emails and chat messages from companies like Google, Facebook and Apple through a programme called PRISM.
Documents leaked by Snowden showed that NSA may have accessed network infrastructure in many countries, causing concerns of potential security threats and data breaches. Even as the new policy is being formulated, there has been no mention yet of how compliance will be ensured.
Several senior government officials in India, including ministers of state for communications & IT Milind Deora and Kruparani Killi, have their Gmail IDs listed in government portals as their official email.
A Google India spokeswoman said the company has not been informed about the ban, and hence it cannot comment on speculation. “Nothing is documented so far, so for us, it is still speculation,” Google said in an email response.
A senior official in the IT department admitted on condition of anonymity that employees turn to service providers such as Gmail because of the ease of use compared with official email services, as well as the bureaucratic processes that govern creation of new accounts.
“You can just go and create an account in Gmail easily, whereas for a government account, you have to go through a process because we have to ensure that he is a genuine government user.”
Last week, IT Minister Kapil Sibal said the new policy would require all government officials living abroad to use NIC servers that are directly linked to a server in India while accessing government email services. Sibal said there has been no evidence of the US accessing Internet data from India.