E-Paper
No porn please, say cyber cafes
The MMS case has changed the way cyber cafes do business.
As he straightened the dog-ears on the new 'Please Don't Search Porn/Sex Photos/Videos' posters in his cyber café, Ravi Kant talked of how the schoolboy's prank gone astray has changed the business of his and hundreds like him.
"We can no longer turn the blind eye," said Kant, one of the hundreds of cyber café owners across India who are trying to curb porn surfing after the sex video scandal where a schoolboy filmed himself and a classmate getting intimate through a mobile phone.
"Everyone is afraid," said Kant. "If something happens, the blame could very well come on us."
The scandal hogged media limelight and even led to two arrests, including that of the CEO of India's biggest online auction portal baazee.com, where the video was briefly sold.
Avnish Bajaj, who is now out on bail, was arrested under the Information Technology Act of 2000, which outlaws "publishing, transmitting or causing to publish any information in electronic form which is obscene".
The law is unclear on who should be held responsible for any offence.
"If you ask me, I'm not sure," said Ravish Rana, another Internet centre owner. "What does 'causing to publish' mean? Who causes? Is it the person who's doing it? The website? Us, as cyber café owners - it's confusing."
So, to clear a bit of the mist, Rana is removing curtains that have hidden surfers at each of the 13 terminals in his Internet Buzz for three years.
This will mean less privacy, but Rana reckons he has to do it to protect himself. "If I see anybody looking at porn, then I will say, 'Please, not here.' If they get angry, well, I'll lose a customer.
"It's better than going to jail."
Like him Manish Raj is putting 'Please Don't Go To Sex Sites' around his café but said it might not be enough. "No one cares about signs, if they are alone, a lot of people watch porn."
In some places, that's not all that they do. Police in Agra have discovered several Internet hubs where the closed doors and secluded cubicles had become a rendezvous for couples.
In the mid-1990s, when cyber cafes became a rage in the country, secluded cubicles were built by most owners to keep peeping toms away.
"There were too many people who would peep into other's emails and surfing," said Gyan Mishra, who has run an Internet centre in Mumbai for the last five years.
"The Internet was a new thing and everyone was curious. But, then, many took advantage of the seclusion and porn surfing became our bane," said Mishra, whose 20 computers have crashed more than 100 times in the last one and a half years due to viruses that crept in through porn downloads.
"Now this case is the limit. We have to be careful."
The customers have mixed reactions to the changing rules. "I think it's good," said Monica Modi, a fashion student. Just division between computers is enough, why should anyone need cubby holes for surfing?"
But Rajesh Singh, a history teacher, disagreed: "Cutting privacy cannot be the answer. Social change always comes slowly and should not be at the cost of the basic right to privacy."
