Earlier, we reported that Election Commission is planning for partnership with Google for upcoming Lok Sabha Election. But, it seems that Election Commission dropped plans . There was a possibility that US government could use data for spying by using the Voter information.
India is world’s largest democracy and Election Commission is facing problem in handling this much amount of data and traffic on website. This is the reason it thought t o partner with Google which has enough experience in handling huge traffic. But the partnership was opposed by Indian Infosec Consortium, alliance of cyber security experts. They feared that Google would leak our data to US government or other American agencies.
Although, there was no official confirmation why the plan was dropped. But Reuters managed to get inside information that Google’s involvement had drawn criticism in India.
“Google is committed to help make public information on the web easily accessible to internet users across the country,” Google said in a statement, “It is unfortunate that our discussion with the Election Commission of India to change the way users access their electoral information, that is publicly available, through an online voter look up tool, were not fruitful.”
As an Indian citizen, I also think that it was a nice decision. Election commission should do what Google had planned but with a company of Indian origin. Trusting US based companies is hard when we already about PRISM program of NSA.
This is not the first time when Google has faced political opposed in India. It was also in news for its mapping service and Google Street view service. After the NSA leak, it is risky to trust on US based tech giants for users’ personal data. No one knows what NSA had deal with these tech giants.
Source: Reuters
