The ‘Bulli Bai’ app case has flooded the internet and created a wave of rage and disgust. A 21-year-old engineering student called Neeraj Bishnoi, the latest “mastermind” and alleged creator of the app, was arrested on Thursday from Jorhat in Assam.

Like its predecessor Sulli Deals, the Bulli Bai app was created on GitHub, an open-source platform where app developers store and share their projects. It has so far refused to hand over information on suspects in both cases, asking the police to send it a legally valid request under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty that the two countries signed in 2005.

GitHub: A background

GitHub is a website that lets developers store and manage their code, track and control changes to it, and share it with others on the platform.

Anyone can sign up and host a public code repository for free, which makes GitHub especially popular with open-source projects. Its user-friendly interface means even novice coders can take advantage of these features.

Because GitHub is collaborative, it is also a rudimentary social network, complete with display pictures, bios and followers.

What has GitHub done so far?

GitHub quickly suspended the account used to create the Bulli Bai app, as it had done with Sulli Deals. A spokesperson said, “GitHub has longstanding policies against content and conduct involving harassment, discrimination, and inciting violence. We suspended a user account following the investigation of reports of such activity, all of which violate our policies.”

The company also said it would cooperate with Indian law authorities, providing their requests were in accordance with internationally recognised legal procedures. “We informed India police of our policy in this case and will assist upon receiving valid legal process from them,” the company said in a statement.

What does this mean?

For companies based overseas, police have to use a procedure under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT) to get information. This is a tedious process that involves multiple foreign ministries.

In the Sulli Deals case, the Delhi Police sent a notice under the Criminal Procedure Code to GitHub, asking for the IP address of the web page where the app was shared. In October, the company responded by saying the police would have to follow the procedure spelled out in MLAT, according to a report in The Hindu. (This, among other reasons, is why India’s upcoming Personal Data Protection Bill calls for storing certain types of data within the country’s borders.)

With the advent of technology and social media platforms in particular, it is virtually impossible to prevent such incidents. Popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter use a combination of humans and AI to filter out criminal and offensive content, but these are far from perfect. Github, meanwhile, has no such filters since it isn’t primarily a social network.

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