visakhapatnam concerned over recent incidents like the one in which two young girls were recently arrested for their posts against the late shiv sena supremo bal thackeray on a social networking site netizens in vizag raised an alarm over the way the it act was being interpreted by the authorities social networking sites are spaces where people use the social interface to interact exchange views and ideas by restricting people the government is undermining the fundamental rights of its citizens said p srinivas an mtech student from andhra university while participating in a seminar on cybercrime conducted by the department of computer science and systems engineering at au agreeing to these concerns m p dubey joint director software technology park of india stpi vizag said that after the recent crackdown on the two young girls who were taken to task for expressing their views the government is now pondering over the other aspect of the law its stringency however having said that he made it clear that there is no such thing as absolute freedom and that the law should be changed into a smarter statute to keep a check on cybercrime he further appealed to the student community present at the seminar to understand the need for such a law and the importance of adhering to the laws of the land delivering the opening address professor gsn raju principal a u engineering college said it had become necessary to understand the terms and conditions and if possible read them thoroughly before joining a social networking site experts also raised concerns over the growing instances of faceless criminals using cyberspace with impunity to bully encroach and stalk people and despite the indian government coming up with a statutory it act in 2008 and pointed out that the number of cybercrime cases had shot up in the last 10 years with more and more people taking to the virtual world according to experts the reasons for the rising incidence of cybercrime were many but the primary one continues to be lack of awareness about the it act many foreign students especially those from african nations were surprised at the fact that india had a comprehensive law on cybercrime ethiopian students abebe tesfanana and wubete nigussie said they wished they had such laws in their country where the number of people on the web was increasing by the day if only we had a department dealing with cybercrime tackling criminals would become a lot easier many other countries from africa too need to adopt such laws said an african student