Chennai: The Central Crime Branch (CCB) police informed the Madras High court that social media giants including Facebook, Twitter and Gmail are not cooperating with the branch relating to investigation of cyber crimes.
The additional commissioner, CCB, MT Ganeshmoorthy, made the submission before the division bench of Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad when a petition filed by Antony Clement Rubin, a resident of Chennai, came up for hearing.
The petitioner sought for a direction to the Union government to make it mandatory to link Aadhaar to all social media accounts. He said if Aadhaar is linked with social media accounts persons committing cyber crimes could be easily identified.
Ganeshmoorthy said social media firms responded to only 484 out of 1,940 requests made by CCB police seeking Internet Protocol (IP) log details of suspected cyber criminals during 2016-2018.
The CCB depends on the information provided by the social media companies to investigate cybercrime complaints.
The department could complete investigation only after receiving complete details including IP logs in social media accounts.
He said on receipt of IP logs for the 484 requests, 9 cases were registered, 28 cases were closed after the complaints were withdrawn by the complainants, 15 were closed as there was no prima facie case made out, 26 IP locations were found located outside India, 286 were pending for receiving IP user details from Internet Service Providers (ISP) and 120 IPs were found to be dynamic IP logs.
He said that CCB has been facing difficulties in obtaining details from social media companies since most of them were located outside the country.
In some cases where IP logs obtained from Facebook, Google, Youtube were sent to ISPs for getting user details, the request remains unanswered or pending for long periods. Companies like Go-daddy, Beam Telecom and Saudi Telecom had never responded to IP user request.
Later, the bench directed the Union government to furnish the regulations governing ISPs and posted the matter to August 27 for further hearing.
