Encryption
Encryption has long been used by militaries and governments to facilitate secret communication. It is now commonly used in protecting information within many kinds of civilian systems. For example, the Computer Security Institute reported that in 2007, 71% of companies surveyed utilized encryption for some of their data in transit, and 53% utilized encryption for some of their data in storage. Encryption can be used to protect data "at rest", such as information stored on computers and storage devices (e.g. USB flash drives). In recent years, there have been numerous reports of confidential data, such as customers' personal records, being exposed through loss or theft of laptops or backup drives; encrypting such files at rest helps protect them if physical security measures fail. Digital rights management systems, which prevent unauthorized use or reproduction of copyrighted material and protect software against reverse engineering (see also copy protection), is another somewhat different example of using encryption on data at rest.
Human rights and encryption
There are a number of limitations on the free deployment of encryption by electronic communications services despite the fact that Indian law and policy promotes and requires the implementation of strong encryption as a security measure, such as in banking, ecommerce and by organizations handling sensitive personal information. There is notable legal uncertainty about the precise legal scope of these license requirements and to what extent they could have legal effect on (the use of or deployment of ) services by the end-users of covered services. The encryption debate ignited publicly in India in 2008 after the Government published a draft proposal with a number of envisioned limitations on the use of encryption. The policy, issued under Section 84A of the Indian Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008 was short-lived, but worries remain about the lack of safeguards for privacy and freedom of expression that the draft illustrated. In response to the outcry, the Indian government first exempted ""mass use encryption products, which are currently being used in web applications, social media sites, and social media applications such as Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter etc."" Soon thereafter, it withdrew the proposed policy and a new policy has not been made public yet.