What led the Govt to absolve social media from Encryption Policy?

Major social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp have been in much controversy over the last couple of months in India with the declaration of Encryption policy  by the Government.

The draft said, “All information shall be stored by the concerned B/C entity for 90 days from the date of transaction and made available to Law Enforcement Agencies and when demanded in line with the provisions of the laws of the country.”

This was composed by a group set up by the Department of Electronics and Information technology under section 84A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.

According to the policy, the draft infringes the right to privacy that comes under the right to life article 21 of the Indian constitution. The government may now access one’s personal/business chats. This enraged the citizens of India on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and engendered heated debates. The clarification came from the government after seeing audience outrage on social platforms.

Govt wont disclose assets of public servants citing privacy, but wants to access our private calls/messages. Fascism? http://t.co/cCE7zPK9FG

— Prashant Bhushan (@pbhushan1) September 22, 2015

Surely a govt that wants to promote Digital India doesn't intend these as unintended consequences of an ill-thought-out encryption policy. — Pranesh Prakash (@pranesh_prakash) September 21, 2015

Might as well appoint a dude to look into my phone and laptop all day long. http://t.co/Q6RcitldNy

— Ashish Shakya (@stupidusmaximus) September 21, 2015

The new social media era encourages people to voice their opinion, nevertheless, with this move the government would be portrayed as a bad cop, therefore they decided to exempt social media from the policy. It also exempted SSL/TLS encryption products that are used in internet banking and also password based transactions.