CYBER CRIME AGAINST WOMEN BY DEBARATI HALDER
Summer vacation has started and all are heading towards
numerous destinations, majority heading towards ancestral homes. Since the easy
availability of tablets, ipads and smart phones ( well, not to speak about the laptops which
are now considered as the older generation in digital gadgets), many children insist carrying
them to their grandparents places to fight ‘boredom’ , to take selfies in so
called ‘exotic’ locations ( well, I got to see children calling a village
temple tank as an ‘exotic location’ too) and to instantly put the family
pictures in the instagram, Facebook etc
by various ways including whatsapp. Some parents and grandparents feel
extremely proud to exhibit their children’s skill in digital technology; some
feel children are getting addicted to the digital gadgets and thereby they
should be given company in using the gadgets. While parents may make a horrible
company in some cases due to their excessive interest in the digital day to day
affair of the children, grand parents can make excellent companions, especially
when the child understands that the grandparent is completely unaware of the
digital tricks and can never play a detective’s role to pierce the privacy of
the child. So what happens when an old man joins his young grandchild in
exploring and contributing to the new digital communication systems? Here are some examples:
Ø Taking random
pictures of the household things, members of the family ( even if they are not
ready to face the camera) and storing them digitally;
Ø Putting
them in the social media without knowing what could be the consequence.
Ø Exploring
parent’s social media profiles with the grandparent by his/her side (especially
when the child knows the password of the parent’s social media profiles) and
thereby giving repeated shocks to the old heads.
Ø In course
of teaching the grandparent some tricks, the child may start sending friends’
request to strangers, make profiles of the grand parent’s friends without
permission, start ‘liking’ numerous posts and share stuffs which may be
dangerous both for the adult as well as the children.
Ø Downloading
private pictures from other’s profiles and storing them in the gadget (well, it
is a ‘fun’ to teach the grandparent how to download pictures).
And why we, net immigrants
should be bothered by these habits of net natives ( the children) or the net aliens
( the older generation)? Well, i have
more than one reason to be worried. I got to see the tablet of one such grand parent
who had stored my own photo without my knowledge. I am not ‘friend’ to him. Neither
he has any profile in any social media. But one of his children is in my
husband’s Facebook friend’s list. The tablet consists many more interesting pictures:
a lady with face pack sitting awkwardly in her night gown, some naked children ready
to jump in the bathtub and so on.....
none of these pictures were taken from proper angles and they looked amateur. When
I confronted the owner of the tablet regarding this, he was more than shocked. He
instantly asked his children( both under 12 years of age) who proudly told it
was none other than their grandfather who became a ‘good student’ of their
digital technology class, who had taken these pictures and downloaded many
other. After the initial shock, came the time to laugh away the matter. But it
was not the matter to laugh away. It needs to be understood that even though a
digital gadget may belong to a particular person, it can be misused by numerous
persons who may get a chance to handle it according to their own wishes. If it
is misused, it can give birth to various issues including identity theft,
sending of anonymous offensive communication and not to mention, unauthorisedly
storing other’s private data including images and voyeurism (which this grandfather-grandchild
duo unknowingly did ). The laws regarding the safe digital communication, safer
internet and safety of women and children are developing in India and one thing
which every one must note is, any offence done by any digital gadget can first
and fore mostly make the owner the gadget primarily liable if he has not established
his innocence in such cases by lodging complaints of missing of the gadget or
the theft of the gadget or the unauthorised usage of his digital data (including
social media profiles). Laws relating to identity theft, sending of anonymous offensive,
unauthorisedly storing other’s private data including images and voyeurism etc,
are strict when it comes to the gender of the victim as well as the offender. The
new Criminal Law amendment Act, 2013 has made several of such offences
punishable especially when the victim is a woman. Not to mention about the
Protection of the children from sexual offences Act, 2012 (POCSO), which has
laid down stricter laws to prevent any sort of exploitation of children,
whether physically or digitally. While the 2013 Act targets male offenders largely for several digital crimes,
information technology act as well as the POCSO Act holistically apply to ‘all’.
The child offenders are neither spared from punishments, including correctional
punishments or fines, irrespective of the fact whether they knowingly or unknowingly
do the mistake. Nonetheless, the owner of the gadget becomes vicariously liable
in such cases and his/her journey through the whole legal procedure may neither
be a cake walk.
Hence be careful. Teach the older
generation how to use the gadget as well as the digital data just in the way children
are to be taught. Do not make the innocents fall victims of new technologies.
Happy holidays
Please
Note: Do not violate copyright of this blog. If you would like to use informations
provided in this blog for your own assignment/writeup/project/blog/article,
please cite it as “Halder D. (2014), “Older generation
and the risks in the digital era
”, 24th April, 2014 Published in http://debaraticyberspace.blogspot.com/
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