Fully-functioning helpline round-the-clock should be devised reporting NCII content: Delhi HC

New Delhi [India], April 26 : The Delhi High Court on Wednesday in its Judgement directed that a fully-functioning helpline which is available round-the-clock should be devised for the purpose of reporting Non-Consensual Intimate Images (NCII) content.
Operators and individuals manning this helpline must be sensitised about the nature of NCII content and must, under no circumstances, indulge in victim-blaming or shaming the victim, added the court.
Delhi High Court also said that the "Online Cybercrime Reporting Portal", which is a central platform available on cybercrime.gov.in, must have a status tracker for the complainant, commencing from the filing of a formal complaint to the removal of the offending content.
The portal must specifically display the various redressal mechanisms that can be accessed by the victim in cases of NCII dissemination. This display should be in all languages specified in the Eighth Schedule.
The cybercrime.gov.in website, along with every other website of Delhi Police, should also notably display the contact details/address of each District Cyber Police Station present in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, said the court.
The bench of Justice Amit Bansal on Wednesday passed a Judgement on a plea moved by a woman seeking, in a nutshell, the blocking of certain sites exhibiting intimate images of her and for registration of a First Information Report (FIR) arising out of the complaint dated 03.08.2021 made by the Petitioner.
Petitioner claimed that despite she approached the Grievance Cells of respondents i.e. Google LLC, Microsoft India Pvt. Ltd. (later replaced by Microsoft Ireland Operations Ltd, which is the entity managing its search engine, Bing), YouTube.com and Vimeo.com, as well as having placed multiple complaints on cybercrime.gov.in, the explicit images of the Petitioner were not taken down.
The Delhi High Court also directed that every District Cyber Police Station must have an assigned Officer who must liaise with the intermediaries against which grievances have been raised by the victim who has approached the Delhi Police and an endeavour should be made to ensure that the grievance is resolved within the time schedules stipulated under the IT Rules.
Search engines must employ the already existing mechanism with the relevant hash-matching technology on the lines of the one developed by Meta. They cannot be allowed to avoid their statutory obligations by stating that they do not have the necessary technology, which is patently false as has been exhibited during the course of the hearing, states Delhi High Court.
The reporting mechanism under Rule 3(2)(c) of the IT Rules must be conveyed to the users by the intermediaries by way of a prominent display of the same on the website of the intermediary. It is necessary for users to be made aware of the reporting mechanism and the onus for educating the users lies on the intermediaries, stated the bench of Justice Amit Bansal.
The search engine cannot insist on requiring the specific URLs from the victim for the purpose of removing access to the content that has already been ordered to be taken down, and the victim cannot be made to face humiliation or harassment by having to approach the authorities or Courts seeking the same relief, added the Bench.
As a long-term suggestion, a trusted third-party encrypted platform may be developed by MEITY in collaboration with various search engines under Rule 3(2)(c) for registering the offending NCII content or the communication link by the user/victim, stated Delhi HC.
Accordingly, the intermediaries in question may assign cryptographic hashes/identifiers to the said NCII, and automatically identify and remove the same through a safe and secure process.
This would reduce the burden on the victim/user to constantly have to scour the
internet for NCII pertaining to them and have to request the removal/de-indexing of individual URLs.
Utmost importance should be accorded to the fact that the privacy of the user/victim must remain inviolable and the data collected for the purposes of using the hash-matching technology is not stored and misused.
On account of the vulnerability of the data involved, the platform must be subject to the greatest of transparency and accountability standards, High Court said in its Judgement.