IT Act and intermediary compliance
Safe harbour · Takedowns · Grievance mechanism
In short
If your website or app hosts content that users post, the IT Act and the Intermediary Guidelines set conditions for keeping your legal protection. We help you meet them.
Where problems usually start
Teams often assume safe harbour applies because they host user content, without checking the conditions attached to it. The site may name no grievance officer, publish no turnaround time and keep no record of what was removed and when. A police or ministry request then gets answered by whoever opens the email, and the moderation rules exist in the support team's habits instead of the terms users accepted.
How we approach it
We advise platforms, marketplaces and services that host user content on whether safe harbour applies and what the Intermediary Guidelines require of them. That covers grievance officers and response timelines, moderation and takedown, requests from law enforcement and government, and what the terms of use must say. Safe harbour depends on published rules, a working grievance process and action on complaints within the set timelines. We also advise on the CERT-In directions, which require certain cyber incidents to be reported within six hours.
What our work involves
- An assessment of whether intermediary status applies to each part of the service, and what follows where it does not.
- A grievance mechanism with a published contact, acknowledgement and resolution timelines, and a record that stands up to scrutiny.
- Takedown and moderation workflows with logged decisions, escalation paths and user notification.
- A protocol for law enforcement and government requests, including cyber incident reporting to CERT-In.
- Terms of use, community rules and moderation practice that describe the same service.
For startups and in-house teams
A platform needs a grievance officer, published rules and a takedown process from the day it opens to users. Once it grows, it also needs a settled protocol for law enforcement and government requests.