monitoring users in the seventh development program; Online platforms must provide user information to the government!

Based on the seventh development plan, the monitoring of users’ information has entered a new stage; Apparently, online platforms are obliged to provide users’ information to the government.

It has been a while since news of the 7th Development Plan Bill has been published, which contains controversial details, and for this reason, it has also been criticized. Now another controversial and bad news about this bill has been published and it seems that the monitoring of users’ information is going to be done seriously in the government.

The 7th Development Program Bill has been submitted to the Islamic Council in 24 chapters and 174 articles in different areas. Many critics say that this program does not contribute to the development of the country and even creates many obstacles in this direction. Now, another clause of this bill has been published, which probably increases the criticism of this plan, especially from users. There is an issue in the fifteenth chapter of this bill, which is included under the title of promotion of public culture and media. This paragraph can show that the information of Iranian users is under the microscope and is a confirmation that the government wants to see what users search on the Internet, what they download, what content they publish, and what actions they take in cyberspace. they give.

Direct reference to the monitoring of users’ information

Article 75 of the Seventh Development Plan Bill states:

In line with the elevation of public culture in order to consolidate the Islamic-Iranian lifestyle, strengthen solidarity and national self-confidence, promote national identity and the spirit of resistance, work and effort in the society, in order to accurately and online count the statistical data needed to facilitate processing, analysis In order to accurately and create a suitable platform for the future study of lifestyle trends in Iranian society as well as their publication, the Ministry of Culture and Guidance, in coordination with the Iranian Statistics Center, is obliged to set up a continuous monitoring, monitoring and evaluation system of indicators of public culture and people’s lifestyle. The executive bodies and the owners of the databases subject to this paragraph are obliged to provide continuous and comprehensive data to this system online.

Therefore, according to this plan, all online platforms and any database that has online data must continuously send user information to the system that is going to be launched and is available to the government and the statistics center.

Apparently, the draft of this bill had pointed more precisely and clearly to the monitoring of users’ lives and information, but in the new plan, the text of this clause has been slightly changed so that it is probably less noticeable; But the essence of the story has not changed. Article 75 of this bill is actually the edited text of Article 161 of the Seventh Development Plan draft bill; In that article, it was clearly emphasized on measuring religiosity, monitoring the lifestyle, behaviors and tendencies of the people in the society, and this was done by monitoring the online information of the users. The text of Article 161 of the draft bill was as follows:

In order to establish and facilitate the processing of analysis and future study of lifestyle trends of the Iranian society and their dissemination through the integration of information from public databases, government and private systems and virtual business platforms (containing big data) with the help of the comprehensive system of the Ministry of Culture and Guidance in coordination with the Iranian Statistics Center and Rahbari And the supervision of the Planning and Evaluation Monitoring Center of the Secretariat of the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution is obliged to set up a monitoring system for continuous monitoring and evaluation of indicators of public culture, measurement of religiosity, the level of spirituality, ethics, and people’s lifestyle with an Islamic-Iranian approach and continuous evaluation of values, tendencies, and behaviors. and cultural and social institutions of Iranian society to take action. All executive bodies and owners of the databases subject to this paragraph are obliged to provide continuous and comprehensive data to the aforementioned database online.

This article, in continuation of the protection plan, is supposed to affect the dimensions of life and behavior of Iranian users in the web space; Because probably the same representatives who approved the protection plan also approve Article 75 of the 7th Development Plan Bill. Hassan Nowrozi, a member of the joint commission of cyber space protection plan, said that the joint commission’s resolution of this plan has been approved, and at the end of last year, news of the approval of the lamp off protection plan was published in the Islamic Council.

The monitoring of users’ information and the monitoring of the content published in cyberspace are common points of the protection plan and Article 75 of the Seventh Development Program bill; Because in Article 15 of the security plan, it was also mentioned to implement the storage and processing of data of Iranian users according to the approvals of the council and related rules and regulations. Article 16 also states:

Cyberspace service providers, in order to make the content of the public space of cyberspace services healthy, are required to refine the criminal content within 12 hours and send the corresponding report to the secretariat of the said working group according to the list and criteria announced by the working group for determining examples of criminal content.

In the note 2 of this article, it is also emphasized that content filtering can be implemented immediately by order of the working group to determine examples of criminal content and judicial authorities. Now, in Article 75 of the 7th Development Plan Bill, the authorities have gone beyond the content of social networks and have aimed to monitor all the information of Iranian users on online platforms and to force databases with online data to send information to the said system.

In any case, even though statesmen, members of parliament and other officials emphasized many times in their interviews that the rights of internet and social network users are not going to be violated, but the evidence shows that unfortunately this is happening and the government It wants to have all user information under its microscope.