Taking a stringent action based on the petition filed in the High Court, regarding the minors being active members of social networking giant Facebook, the Delhi High Court has issued a notice to the Central government inquiring about how the minors, those under the age of 18 under Indian law, could open accounts on social networking sites like Facebook besides having active email accounts on the Gmail, Yahoo and Rediff.
The action came after BJP leader, KN Govindacharya filed a petition seeking an order for recovery of taxes from the websites on their income from operations in India.
Based on the petition in which the Delhi High Court has made both Google Inc and Facebook Inc as respondents along with issuance of the notice, a two member Division Bench comprising of Justice B.D. Ahmed and Justice Vibhu Bakhru has asked the central government to respond within 10 days. Meanwhile the Court, who had the custody of the petition since June 2012, has fixed May 13 as the next date for hearing.
Govindacharya’s counsel Veerag Gupta argued that children below 18 are getting into an agreement with the social networking sites. Stating that this was not only against the Indian Majority Act, the Indian Contract Act and the Information and Technology Act, but also making the minors vulnerable to the transfer of information. He also raised the issue of invasion of privacy of users of the sites as their data was being transferred to the U.S. for commercial use.
However, the petition about underage children joining Facebook and Gmail is bound to gain merit on the account of the fact that Facebook’s own terms of service clearly states that anyone under the age of 13 cannot use the service and also that users will not provide any false personal information on Facebook. Further, the search engine giant Google too has acknowledged that that access to some of its services comes with age requirements although it does not specify any age restriction.
It may be recalled that in June 2012, in its statement filed before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Facebook had revealed that more than eight crore of its registered users had given false identities.
Commenting on the issue, some of the cyber experts believe that lying about the age by the minors on FB and other networking sites could be considered as a criminal offense and their parents too could face consequences if their children are logging onto such sites while they are underage. Creation of a false electronic record is considered to be an offence under the Information Technology Act and the Indian Penal Code. Under Section 465, and attracts a punishment of up to two years’ imprisonment
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