Cyber Cafe Owners Irked Over Proposed Fingerprint Plan
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It looks like terrorism is playing havoc with cyber cafe business these days.Earlier it was responsible to introduce stringent rules regarding user information for record purposes, now it has taken it a step forward with recent police proposal of making fingerprint compulsory in cyber cafe’s.
Mumbai police recently chalked out a plan to make fingerprint scanners mandatory at internet cafes further increasing its control over cyber cafe’s. The talks have already started between cafe owners and police to discuss nitty-gritty of the proposed plan. This certainly seems to have irked cafe owners as they are already reeling under current stringent rules regarding recording of user information and this would only make things tough for them.
There are currently 1000 unauthorized cyber cafes in the Mumbai city apart from 800 registered cyber cafes.The proposed regulation could also have drastic effect on cafes across India as passing mustered in Mumbai would mean possible appliance of regulation across the country.
The police seems to be taking such drastic measure to avoid usage of public computers for cyber crimes. In recent Mumbai blast many college PC were used for sending terror mails but cafe related crimes seems to have taken a beating.This seems to have been arguing point for cafe owners who feels that crimes rate originating from cafes is down dramatically.
WATBlog spoke to one of the cafe owners regarding the issue. On assurance of anonymity he said,”We are already doing everything possible to keep a check on users.The fingerprint plan is just a tool to harass us and show–off operation put by police regarding their stringency.”
Currently all cafe owners are required to maintain a log book where in they note down user related information.To get access a user has to provide name, home address, phone number and ID card for user identification.
The fingerprint argument won’t serve any great purpose in home land security and at best would be cost and time cumbersome for cafe owners and users. This would also discourage users from visiting cafe’s as they might not like the idea of going through numerous security procedures. The government should rather focus on shutting down cafes not abiding by its current rules which are apt to forestall cyber crime from public computers.
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