Indonesia’s listening in on private internet chat groups. WhatsApp with that?
- With anger still simmering over Widodo’s election victory, Jakarta has taken to ‘throttling bandwidth’, partial internet shutdowns and cyber patrols
- Campaigners say both privacy and the law are being violated
The action came as supporters of the losing candidates took to the streets in protest, claiming widespread electoral fraud, in a demonstration that soon snowballed into deadly violence.
Over the following four days a partial internet shutdown meant users were unable to send multimedia content or place calls online. They could only send texts.
Whatever the motivation for the shutdown, it “didn’t help to scale down the riot”, according to the human rights non-profit organisation Kontras. If anything, the group said, it showed “the state’s lack of responsibility”.
Instead, privacy and legal experts have been alarmed by the speed and ease with which the government took its battle against misinformation online to private chat groups. They question the legality of such cyber patrolling and say it raises doubts over the government’s procedures to protect the data and privacy of the country’s 171 million internet users.