March 2018 Newsletter
March 2018 newsletter
Dear readers,
Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.
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Articles:
- NPAs & Bad Banks (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard and Organizing India Blogspot; March 1, 2018).
- Digital native: Our lonely connected lives (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 11, 2018).
- Cambridge Analytica scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook (Sunil Abraham; Business Standard; March 28, 2018).
CIS in the News:
- CIS ranks amongst top think tanks for public policy in the region (March 2, 2018). Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program featured Centre for Internet & Society in its annual report.
- Is there a case for penalizing fake news? (Nilesh Christopher; ET Tech; March 7, 2018).
- Supreme Court extends Aadhaar linking deadline till it passes verdict (Priyanka Mittal and Komal Gupta; Livemint; March 13, 2018).
- Aadhaar unique IDs in India: a qualified success? (Web Fraud Prevention and Online Authentication Market Guide 2017/2018 and Paypers; March 16, 2018).
- Facebook breach: Privacy advocates in India seek stronger data laws (Surabhi Agarwal and Devina Sengupta; March 20, 2018).
- Govt warns Facebook of stringent legal action if found misusing data (Komal Gupta; Livemint; March 21, 2018).
- Without stringent law, threats to Mark Zuckerberg are hollow: Experts (Alnoor Peermohamed and Karan Choudhury; Business Standard; March 23, 2018).
- ‘If an Indian party acted like Cambridge Analytica, it will not be guilty under current laws’ (Amit Bhardwaj; Newslaundry; March 24, 2018).
- Is Facebook too powerful without legal safeguards? (Vidhi Choudhary; Hindustan Times; March 24, 2018).
- Digital Native: A new road to justice (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 25, 2018).
- Aadhaar safety (Asian Age; March 25, 2018).
- PM’s app also susceptible (Free Press Journal; March 25, 2018).
- New Lock For EU’s Digital Mines (Arindam Mukherjee; Outlook; March 26; 2018).
- Security experts say need to secure Aadhaar ecosystem, warn about third party leaks (Nilesh Christopher; March 26, 2018).
- Data Breach: How will the biggest scandal that Facebook is mired in affect its credibility in India? (G. Seetharaman and Shephali Bhatt; Economic Times; March 26, 2018).
- UIDAI servers or third parties, Aadhaar leaks are dangerous: Experts (Mayank Jain; Business Standard; March 27, 2018).
- Narendra Modi’s personal app sparks India data privacy row (Financial Times; March 28, 2018).
- The Narendra Modi app: The secret weapon in BJP’s elections arsenal (Jayadevan PK and Pankaj Mishra; Factor Daily; March 29, 2018).
- Your mobile apps have the permission to spy on you (Economic Times; March 30, 2018).
- Parties seek social media influencers to go viral (Ipsita Basu; Economic Times; March 31, 2018).
- If data is the new oil, how much does an Indian citizen lose? (Saurya Sengpupta; Hindu; March 31, 2018).
Accessibility
India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and accessibility policies. CIS works to facilitate this.
Blog Entry
- Groundbreaking disability rights activist Javed Abidi dies at 53 (Ambika Tandon; March 6, 2018).
Access to Knowledge
Access to Knowledge (A2K) is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. Our A2K program comprises 2 projects: Pervasive Technologies done under a grant from International Development Research Centre examining interplay between cost-effective pervasive technologies and intellectual property and encouraging development of such technologies for social good, and Wikipedia under a grant from Wikimedia Foundation to enable the growth of Indic language communities and cultivate new editors in different Indian languages.
Wikipedia
Events Organized
The reports for the events were published in March 2018:
- Marathi Language Day events (February 27, 2018). Marathi Language day is celebrated all over world on February 27. Various events and activities were conducted by CIS-A2K in collaboration with community, institutions and government departments. A guest editorial was published in Sakal newspaper on February 10, 2018. There was a radio interview Tomato FM 94.3 Kolhapur on February 27, 2018 for which promotion was made through Facebook. News on the events was also covered in Pudhari, Lokmat and Samana.
- Mini Train the Trainer 2018 (Organized by CIS-A2K; Jnana Prabodhini & Bhave High School; Sadashiv Peth, Pune; February 24 - 25, 2018).
Blog Entry
- Chromebook for the Project Tiger- How it is helping me to contribute actively on Wikimedia project! (Sangram Keshari Senapati; March 26, 2018).
Openness
Innovation and creativity are fostered through openness and collaboration. Our work in the Openness program focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software.
Note: We missed carrying our updates in our Openness program in previous newsletter, hence reproducing them here.
Open Data
- Open Data and Land Ownership - Environment Scan (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; February 12, 2018).
- On World Water Day - Open Data for Water Resources (Craig Dsouza; March 22, 2018).
Open Access
Open Access India recently released a statement to promote openness in science and research communities. CIS contributed to the text and introduced it to the participants of OpenCon 2018, Delhi.
- Delhi Declaration on Open Access (Open Access India; February 14, 2018).
Internet Governance
The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision making procedures and programs that shape the evolution and use of the internet. CIS is engaged in two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.
Free Speech & Expression
Blog Entry
- Analysis of ICANN financials from 2012-2016 (Sunil Abraham, Arjun Venkatraman and Akriti Bopanna; March 15, 2018).
Cyber Security
Blog Entry
- People Driven and Tech Enabled – How AI and ML are Changing the Future of Cyber Security in India (Shweta Mohandas; March 11, 2018).
Participation in Event
- Cybersecurity: The Intersection of Policy and Technology (Organized by Synergia Foundation; Bengaluru; March 15, 2018).
Privacy
Events Organized
- Roundtable on A.I. and Governance in India (Organized by CIS; India Islamic Centre, New Delhi; March 16, 2018).
- A Methods Workshop for Researching Future of Work in India (Co-organized by CIS and the Department of Management Studies, IIT-Delhi; New Delhi; March 28, 2018).
- Siri, did you hear me? Adapting Privacy to New Technologies, Automated Decision-making, and Cloud Computing (Organized by USIBC; New Delhi; March 6, 2018). Amber Sinha was a panelist.
- White Paper on Data Protection and Privacy (Organized by National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; New Delhi; March 8, 2018). Sunil Abraham was a moderator in the session on Rights and Protections and Amber Sinha was a panelist.
- Listening Machines - New interfaces for Art-Science and Technology Policy (Organized by National Academy of Sciences, Washington D.C; Arthur M Sackler Colloquia; March 12, 2018). Sharath Chandra presented his work "Listening Machines - New interfaces for Art-Science and Technology Policy".
- Quantified identities as a global phenomenon: analyzing the impact of biometric systems in our societies (Internet Freedom Festival; Valencia, Spain; March 2018). Amber Sinha made a presentation.
Telecom
CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:
Newspaper Column
- NPAs & Bad Banks (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; February 28, 2018 and Organizing India Blogspot; March 1, 2018).
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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:
Blog Entry
- Information Infrastructures, State, and Citizens: An Initial Literature Survey (Khetrimayum Monish Singh, Ranjit Singh, Palashi Vaghela, and Nazifa Ahmed; March 28, 2018).
Event Organized
- Designing Urban Nervous Systems (Organized by CIS; Bengaluru; March 27, 2018). Dr. Anupam Saraph, a future designer and an expert on complex systems gave a talk on looking at cities as living organisms, with nervous systems at the center of their being.
About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.
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► Support Us
► Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at [email protected] (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at [email protected] (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at [email protected].
