Supreme Court Advocates has written a letter to the Supreme Court Chief Justice regarding infringement of fundamental right of privacy by of the citizens on account of permitting use of video conferencing application named “Zoom”.
The Petition states that instead of suggestive steps issued by Ministry of Home Affairs, it should have recommended to ban the application if it was found unsafe for children.
Describing about how the Zoom application gained momentum, the Petition states that Government of India has declared lockdown to curb spread of Covid-19, thereby restricting physical movement of individuals. Therefore, due to restrictions on physical movements, virtual or digital means are being used to communicate work, attend meeting, take online classes and other works possible for audio/visual facilities.
After usage of Zoom for these purposes, it was found that this app is not secured with end to end encryption as safety feature and also some malicious ransom emails were received by zoom app users.
As the app is being widely used to provide online classes to children, the data can be misused for exploitation and their videos can be used for illegal and pornographic purposes.
The Letter Petition refers to the advisory issued by MHA on 12.04.2020 where it accepted but did not ban Zoom application. Also developers of the application have accepted vulnerabilities in it and stated that considerable time is required to fix them.
Petition stresses on need to ban the app as advisory of MHA cannot be followed by every normal user of app putting user data at heavy risk resulting in mass violation of privacy. K. S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India is quoted to emphasise on the fact that the fundamental right to privacy is sacrosanct right guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution of India as declared by the nine Judges constitution bench of Hon’ble Supreme Court.
Hence, the letter petition drafted by Sanpreet Singh Ajmani and Aneesh Sharma prays for cognisance of the serious issue at hand and passing of orders to protect fundamental right of privacy of all citizens.
–India Legal Bureau