RIM faces an August 31st deadline to respond to the Indian government’s request to give it the ability to read instant messages sent over BlackBerry Messenger and email. This marks the third country, after the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, to express concern over the data security of RIM’s international BlackBerry online infrastructure. 

 

At present all BlackBerry data traffic internationally is rerouted to RIM server farms in other countries such as Canada, the US and the UK. Complainant countries have voiced concerns that the movement of this data to other territories without sufficient monitoring may pose a domestic security risk. 

 

According to Reuters, RIM has now confirmed that it will offer India a technical solution for decoding encrypted BlackBerry data, a similar gesture to that which it offered Saudi Arabia just a week ago. 

 

India currently accounts for 1 million of RIM’s 41 million BlackBerry users worldwide.