International Governments are at it again.
The telecoms regulatory agency in Indonesia, also known as BTRI, has advertised that they may shut down RIM’s BBM and Internet Services after the company declined to establish BBM servers within the country. For undisclosed reasons, RIM had decided to put it’s servers in the neighboring country of Singapore. The reason given by BTRI for this being unacceptable is a simple “the data exchange is not safe”.
Sound familiar??? You go it, the countries of Saudi Arabia and India have threatened to do the exact same thing recently, though they were more forthcoming with the reason, which is to be able to monitor the transmissions. Anyone can guess that the chances are Indonesia wants to do the exact same thing.
Here’s the kicker:Â All BBM data is handled in Canada through RIM’s datacenters.
This simply means that with no local servers setup on any of these countries soil, these governments have almost no authority over the information which shows RIM’s loyalty is to “us”, their customers, or so we hope. Although this type of situation is becoming more and more common where governments naturally think it is within their best interest to be able to monitor their citizens, this has the potential to become a VERY slippery slope.
Don’t think it hasn’t happened already. RIM has said they provided some private information to governments when asked. They say that there is no way they are able to pry into our private conversations, but who knows? This is just the beginning of the situation in Indonesia. As with most of these arguments, there will be some sort of compromise made whether it is to the benefit, or not, of us as customers.
I guess we will all just have to wait and see how things transpire, and in the meantime pray to the smartphone gods that this type of “Big Brother” attitude towards our beloved BlackBerry’s doesn’t start to take momentum worldwide.