Home ministry bans on Facebook, pen drive use in government offices

New delhi date. 13 July 2019, Saturday

To prevent incidents like data leak and hacking from government offices, the Union Home Ministry has now issued a policy-based strict guidelines on the use of Internet and social media for government employees. The new rules implemented by the National Information Security Policy and Guidelines (NISPG) are intended to prevent theft of sensitive data due to the negligence of government employees to store secret government data on cloud services. According to the new rules of the Ministry of Home Affairs, government employees can not use social media at the time of their working phone or computer.

The new policy will be implemented only on government employees, but it will also apply to all persons who can access government data. The ministry has said that under this policy, the employees of the contract employees, consultants, partners, information systems, facilities, communication networks are supported and supported, as well as third party employees receiving, processing and processing information from the government.

The new policy also bans the removal of USB devices from office without proper authority on government employees. Not only that, the official websites including mobile, computers and laptops have been banned from using Facebook, social media sites such as Twitter, during working hours in the office.

Additionally, any government classified information can not be stored on private cloud services such as Google Drive, Dropbox, Icloud. There is also a warning that the panel action may be taken against the employees who are not implementing these rules in the case of data leakage.

In addition, any government email account has been banned from accessing public Wi-Fi connections. Sensitive data can only be stored on removable storage media allocated by the organization solely on account of work ethic. While working on home Wi-Fi, a government employee will have to set up Media Access Control on their routers. Apart from this, the use of home Wi-Fi in the work will have to follow another specific procedure.