New Delhi : The new law regarding Virtual Private Network (VPN) is coming into force from the last week of June. In protest against the new law, many big companies like NordVPN have announced to leave India and now in the meantime, the government has issued an order saying that government employees should not use non-government cloud services like Google Drive and Dropbox. Government employees have also been prohibited from using VPNs.
NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Tor and proxies VPNs have been banned in a 10-page report from the government. Apart from this, the use of remote control apps such as TeamViewer, AnyDesk and Ammyy Admin is also prohibited.
Government employees have also been asked not to use any external e-mail service and not to use third party video conferencing apps etc. for serious issues. The use of any external website for the cloud service is also prohibited.
All government offices have been ordered to change the passwords of all systems. Apart from this, the firmware of all the computers has also been ordered to be updated. If the order has been issued for all government employees. This includes permanent, temporary, contractual employees. This order has been issued by NIC and CERT-In on June 10.
What has the government said about VPN?
CERT, an agency of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, said in an order last week that VPN service providers will have to store data including names, email IDs and IP addresses of their users for five years or more. It has been said in the order that if the registration of a VPN company is cancelled due to any reason, then even after that it can be asked for data. Simply put, even after a VPN company is closed or banned, it will have to give data to the government. The new law regarding VPN is coming into force from 28 June 2022. It has also been said in the order that all service providers should provide the facility of mandatorily login in their system.
