Today, the Lok Sabha passed the amended IT Bill under which publishing and transmitting obscene material in electronic form and other e-commerce frauds will now be punishable.

Provisions to the existing Information Technology Act, 2000 is added by the Information Technology (Amendment) Bill, 2006, in order to deal with the new forms of cyber crimes like publicizing sexually explicit material in electronic form, video voyeurism and breach of confidentiality and leakage of data by intermediary and e-commerce frauds.

 A Cyber Appellate Tribunal is proposed by the Bill, enabling the authentication of the electronic records by any electronic signature technique. The Central government has to decide the number of members of the tribunal later, according to the Bill.

The Central government is also given power by the amended bill to issue directives for the intercepting, monitoring or decryption of any information through computer.
Furthermore, the government is also enabled to intercept computer communication in any investigation. But telephones and letters may only be intercepted in the national interest.

How the personal information may be collected, processed, shared and used is however neither covered by the IT Act nor by any other law. Furthermore, the Bill does not address the issue of the breach of privacy, although it provides compensation for the unlawful loss or gain arising from the unauthorized use of data.