Personal data isn’t collected: MHA
New Delhi: The home ministry has told a Parliamentary panel that security agencies use open-source intelligence from public sources, including social media, to gather information, emphasising that no privacy breach occurs as personal data isn’t collected.
The ministry’s submission was made to the Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology (2024-25), chaired by Lok Sabha member Nishikant Dubey, which tabled its report on Monday.
The committee had sought to know from the ministry how it dealt with the issue of privacy while scraping through the internet and through social media.
“Publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms is used for intelligence gathering. No private or personal information is gathered from social media. Hence, privacy is never violated,” the ministry told the panel.
Scraping generally refers to the use of computer programmes, tools or software (called web scrapers) to automatically browse public web pages or social media posts; extract specific information (e.g., names, phone numbers, keywords, hashtags, trends, images); store or analyse that information for law enforcement or intelligence purposes, it said.
The ministry said the type of data that can be scraped by the authorised security agencies only from publicly available sources using open-source intelligence technique may include social media posts like public tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, deepfakes or morphed media, fake news or misinformation, including viral instigating content spreading communal hatred.
The scraping may be used to collect hashtags and trends, for example, from YouTube channels and Telegram groups, for radical content and posts that promote extremist ideologies or share propaganda videos or bomb-making tutorials.
It said the technique may be used to monitor scam websites or links to track, for example, online gambling, fake job scams, and fake investment scams.
It may be used on matrimonial and dating Platforms for honey traps or fraud, and from dark web marketplaces for the extraction of cryptocurrency wallet addresses, it said, giving examples of the process.
“Public profiles on matrimonial/dating sites may be scraped in cybercrime investigations where people are blackmailed or trapped into sharing sensitive data,” it said while giving examples.
The ministry told the panel that AI is being used for intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence, with key applications including face recognition, social media parsing and network analysis, natural language processing for analysis of structured and unstructured data, pattern analysis and hidden connections, etc.
“Additionally, AI is used for entity resolution, enabling accurate identification and correlation of individuals across multiple data sources,” it said.
