Bhubaneswar, Sept. 15: The government had issued a set of norms in August last year to put a check on cyber crimes. But not all cyber café owners are following the guidelines.

Issued under the Information Technology (Guidelines for Cyber Cafe) Rules, 2011, the norms made it mandatory for cyber café owners in Bhubaneswar and Cuttack to register with the police.

But sources in the city police said that except for a handful of cyber café owners, most of them are yet to obtain a licence from the police.

While there are more than 200 cyber cafés in Cuttack, more than 100 such facilities are operating in Bhubaneswar.

The guidelines had made it mandatory for cyber café owners to establish the identity of visitors using the facility.

A user must produce a valid identity card to establish identity. In the absence of such identity proofs, cyber café owners were instructed to photograph the user through web cameras.

The guideline also stipulates that all the computers at the café should install safety and filtering software to prevent access to websites containing pornography, obscenity, terrorism and other objectionable materials. The café owners must display a board prohibiting the users from viewing pornographic sites.

Similarly, the cafe owners were also asked to maintain a logbook with details of name, address, gender, contact number, detail of identification document, computer terminal identification, log in time and log out time of the users.

The cyber café owners were asked to preserve the log register for a period of at least one year.

But most cyber cafés in the city violate these norms.

“The café owner is supposed to provide every related document, registers and any necessary information to the inspecting officer on demand. So, the police must crackdown on cafés that are violating the norms,” said an official of the state information technology department.

Last year, the information technology department asked the Odisha Computer Application Centre to hire a software agency to develop a web portal for online registration of cyber cafés.

Sources in the information technology department said that though the centre had already floated a tender, it was yet to be awarded.

“We have to hire more than one person to manage cafés if we are to follow the guidelines. With our small profits, we cannot afford to hire staff to implement the security measures,” said Ajai Behuria, a cyber café owner in Patia.

THE RULEBOOK

Keep identity proof of visitors

Maintain log of users with details such as name, address and contact number

Maintain user identity information and register in secure manner

Maintain record of staff for a year

Display board, clearly visible to users, prohibiting them from viewing pornographic sites

Equip computers with commercially available safety or filtering software to avoid access to porn sites