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Despite of growth and surge in sales, RIM is under fire for the last few years. Governments have been negotiating with the Canadian based company to let them read whatever it stores into its servers.
Just recently, UAE government has decided to put a ban on Blackberry smartphones from October unless the device maker gives the government all the access to monitor and read the data traffic through its servers.
Decision from UAE government has come after numerous failed dialogues between RIM and the regulator in UAE where later has been unable to break Blackberry’s highly secured codes in order to access the transmitted data. RIM process the information of its users through one of its secure Network Operations Centers around the world. Governments fear that communication for most of the criminal activities are conducted using this service. In July, RIM had offered the government to give the access of some 3000 subscribers out of its 500,000 UAE based blackberry clients which UAE government had refused.
Last year in January 2009, state controlled telecommunication player, Etisalat had asked its 145,000 subscribers to upgrade the software on their devices by downloading a program it claimed would improve performance. Later, RIM management confirmed that the said program “Interceptor” was a spyware and meant to capture, read and store the emails of customer. RIM later sent a warning to its customers to avoid downloading any such thing that could be an attempt to breach the security.
According to Al Arabiya television, Saudi government has also ordered to impose a ban on Blackberry Messenger services effective from August. Currently, Saudi Arabia has near 690,000 Blackberry users. Similarly, Indian situation is no different. After years of battle with RIM, finally, Indian government threatened to ban BlackBerry services unless RIM gave it access to data transferred by its messaging system.
To date, RIM has sold more than 75 million Blackberry devices across the world and if such threats and warnings are not taken into account by the management, the governments may start looking for other alternatives.
