Praneeta Prakash 
The Online Safety Commission has called for a review of the Online Safety Act 2018 in response to the current surge in cybercrime.
The Commission made the plea while presenting submissions on the Convention on Cybercrime before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defense.
Online Safety Working Group Member Savenaca Siwatibau says they have made recommendations to review the act.
“We are recommending to the Minister to review the Online Safety Act, and that is just to encapsulate the current trend of online crimes that evolve with the evolving technology. As technologies evolve, the crime trend also evolves with them, and we are trying to get our laws on online safety to be able to protect our citizens from this evolving crime.”
Acting Online Safety Commissioner Tajeshwari Devi highlighted certain parts of the act that need to be looked into again.
“In terms of Section 3 of the Online Safety Act, the objective says the Online Safety Commission can only look into matters such as online bullying, internet trolling, cyber stalking, and image-based abuse, so we want to sort of expand that because in cyberbullying, it says in respect of children, but adults face most of the abuses online, so we may as well expand it more to adult abuse or any other forms of abuse that the Online Safety Commission has received.”
She adds that there has been an increase in cybercrime incidents and online abuse.
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