BlackBerry has been targeted by a number of governments in the past for not providing access to data exchanged by it’s users. While the list formerly included India and Saudi Arabia, now Indonesia wants access to the data. The telecom regulatory agency in Indonesia, BTRI, demanded RIM to establish BlackBerry servers within Indonesia. However, RIM has refused and BTRI says it may have to shut down BlackBerry services in Indonesia.
RIM offered that it would place it’s BlackBerry servers for Indonesian users in the neighbouring Singapore. But the Indonesian government has refused the offer. Right now, most of data exchange on BlackBerry devices is stored on data-centres in Canada. This necessarily means that other countries can not access this data. A number of countries have wanted to have this data on the pretext of ‘national security’ and in some instance, RIM has been forced to submit certain data to these countries. But so far, RIM hasn’t established servers elsewhere.
In an increasing digital world, the governments around the globe are becoming increasingly interested in monitoring the data exchanged over smartphones and cellphones. This allows for thorough monitoring and surveillance. Of course the common users don’t want this and would want to avoid it as far as possible. RIM has so far fairly born the pressure by these governments and has only yielded in some, limited cases. But with the pressure mounting up on it, with the risk of losing it’s customer base in certain countries, it seems like either RIM will have to give in to these unfair demands or an international accord needs to be pushed to keep all countries in line.
Image courtesy arrayexception.
