Social media scraping is safe: MHA

The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) has told a parliamentary panel that security agencies rely exclusively on open-source intelligence (OSINT) drawn from publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms, stressing that no private or personal data is collected and therefore no privacy is violated.

The MHA’s detailed submission was made to the Standing Committee on Communications and Information Technology (2024-25), chaired by Lok Sabha member Nishikant Dubey. The committee tabled its report in Parliament on Monday after seeking clarifications on how the Union Government handles privacy concerns while scraping the internet and social media for intelligence purposes.

“Publicly available information on the internet and social media platforms is used for intelligence gathering. No private or personal information is gathered from social media. Hence, privacy is never violated,” the ministry stated in its written reply to the panel. ‘Scraping’, the MHA explained, involves the use of specialised computer programmes and tools that automatically browse only public web pages and social media posts, the MHA submitted before the parliamentary committee.

These tools extract specific, openly accessible information such as public tweets, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, deep fakes, morphed media, fake news, misinformation, viral content spreading communal hatred, hashtags, trends, and propaganda material from YouTube channels and Telegram groups, it said.

The ministry also listed several operational uses of the technique, such as monitoring radical content, extremist ideologies, propaganda videos or bomb-making tutorials shared on public platforms. Tracking scam websites and links related to online gambling, fake job offers and fraudulent investment schemes, scrutinising public profiles on matrimonial and dating platforms in cybercrime cases involving honey traps and blackmail and extracting cryptocurrency wallet addresses from dark web marketplaces during investigations.

The panel was also informed that artificial intelligence is now playing a central role in intelligence gathering and counter-intelligence operations. Key AI applications include face recognition, social media parsing, network analysis, natural language processing for structured and unstructured data, pattern recognition and entity resolution, which helps accurately identify and link individuals across multiple public sources.

“AI is helping security agencies in enhancing their capabilities for intelligence gathering and counter-terrorism efforts by rapidly analysing vast datasets, detecting anomalies, predicting patterns, cross-linkages, etc., thereby improving decision-making, speed and accuracy,” the ministry said.

The ministry highlighted that the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) is already using AI for narrative and sentiment analysis on open-source social media platforms. An “AI-driven intelligence fusion centre” for the CRPF is in the final stage of deployment. Once operational, it will ingest massive volumes of structured and unstructured data and generate actionable analysis and decision-support solutions for operational requirements.

It added that AI can automate the processing of diverse data sources, including communication records, open-source intelligence, financial transactions and surveillance feeds, enabling quicker threat identification, anomaly detection and linkage analysis. Natural language processing tools are particularly useful for multilingual monitoring, including regional dialects, and for decoding sensitive content from both the open and dark web.

The submission by the MHA before the parliamentary panel has come amid growing scrutiny over digital surveillance and data privacy. By emphasising that only publicly available information is accessed and no personal data is harvested, the MHA has sought to address concerns raised by the various groups.