All Blogs
Call for respondents: the implementation of government-ordered censorship
The Centre for Internet and Society is conducting interviews with people whose content has been affected by blocking orders from the Indian Government.
Opinion: Delicensing 6 GHz, 60 GHz bands is crucial to improve Wi-Fi scenario in India
Recently, there has been growing demand from industry bodies and associations to delicense 6 GHz and 60 GHz bands in India.
Online caste-hate speech: Pervasive discrimination and humiliation on social media
A research report on the contours of online caste-hate speech and how social media platforms moderate such expression.
Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP): An Opportunity for Funding Rural Internet Connectivity in India
A paper titled "Gram Panchayat Development Plan (GPDP): An Opportunity for Funding Rural Internet Connectivity in India" authored by CIS' researcher Abhishek Raj got published in the book "Community Networks: Towards Sustainable Funding Models". This book was released at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum(IGF) 2021, and is also the official outcome of the IGF Dynamic Coalition on Community Connectivity (DC3).
Covid-19 and Platform Work: Reflections on Institutional Policy Responses
The impact of Covid-19 on labor and employment has been profound. The nature of the pandemic and combative public health measures, including lockdowns and constraints on mobility, had unique implications for different sectors of the economy. Informal workers, who constitute 80% of the total employed workers in India (over 90% in the urban economy), emerged as most vulnerable. Informal workers’ vulnerability is caused by their historically exploitative working conditions and persistent exclusion from protective legislations and social security systems. Similarly, workers engaged by digital labor platforms, who are rapidly constituting a new precariat in urban India, faced widespread loss of livelihood and erosion of rights during the pandemic.
Read the full report here.
A Civil Society Agenda for E-Shram
On August 26, 2021, the Union Minister for Labour and Employment launched e-Shram, a national database portal for the targeted delivery of social security entitlements to India’s unorganized workers. Despite constituting over 93% of India’s workforce, unorganized workers have been left out of social protection nets. This category of workers, including platform and migrant workers, also face innumerable employment-related vulnerabilities in urban settings, which have been heightened in recent times by the economic shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic.
As an initiative that seeks to tackle the deep precarity and dearth of protection for unorganized workers, e- Shram is a welcome step. Just three months after the launch of the portal, close to 10 crore unorganized workers have registered as per official statistics.1 However, the experiences of unions and workers’ organizations on the ground have been marred by glitches in its technical infrastructure,2 a stark digital divide and limited digital literacy.3 The digital delivery of welfare also invites legitimate scrutiny about workers’ privacy and data rights.
In a strategy meeting held on September 29, 2021, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and IT for Change sought to enable a dialogue among trade union representatives, researchers, practitioners working on informal sector issues, and digital rights activists on their experiences with using the portal, along with the impediments they and their constituents have faced during this process. The list of participants is enclosed in Annexure 1.
Many of the issues discussed at the meeting continue to affect the efficiency of the roll-out of e-Shram. Therefore, this report, in addition to crystallizing discussions at the meeting, highlights challenges that actors on the ground have faced, and proceeds to outline a broad set of recommendations from civil society organizations for the Ministry of Labour and Employment, Government of India, on how to strengthen the design and implementation of the e-Shram portal.
Click here to read the full report.
Launching CIS’s Flagship Report on Private Crypto-Assets
The Centre for Internet & Society is launching its flagship report on regulating private crypto-assets in India, as part of its newly formed Financial Technology (or Fintech) research agenda. The event will be held on Zoom, at 17:30 IST on Wednesday, 15th December, 2021
Gender and gig work: Perspectives from domestic work in India
Platforms have the potential to be instrumental in protecting workers rights, but the current platform design is not optimised to protect workers’ interests especially those of women in the gig economy, argues Ambika Tandon, a senior researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society in India and an author of the report on ‘Platforms, Power and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India’.
AI in the Future of Work
Artificial Intelligence and allied technologies form part of what is being called the fourth Industrial Revolution.
Practicing Feminist Principles
AI can serve to challenge social inequality and dismantle structures of power.
Are India’s much-lauded startups failing their women workers?
Recent protests outside Urban Company’s head office highlight the gendered nature of work in the country’s digital economy.
Between Platform and Pandemic: Migrants in India's Gig Economy
In response to the rising number of COVID-19 cases in India, the central government announced a nationwide lockdown in March 2020.
Who Funds Us
CIS is able to conduct its research only through the support of both long term, and short term donors, who are also acknowledged throughout our website on the publications they support. Below is a list of past donors across the years who have supported us.
International Cyber Law Toolkit scenario: Internet blockage
Arindrajit Basu and Gurshabad Grover’s scenario and international law analysis Internet Blockage was published as part of the NATO Co-operative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence’s Cyber Law Toolkit as part of its September 2021 annual update.
#CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping
Sahapedia is organising the #CultureForAll Conference on Cultural Mapping, digitally on September 28 and 29, 2021. The conference will take place in collaboration with the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, Azim Premji University, the Centre for Internet and Society, and the Re-Centring Afro Asia project at the University of Cape Town.
Facial Recognition Technology in India
The Human Rights, Big Data and Technology Project, University of Essex, UK and the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) have jointly published a research paper on facial recognition technology. Authors, Elonnai Hickok, Pallavi Bedi, Aman Nair and Amber Sinha, examine technological tools such as CCTV and FRT which are increasingly being deployed by the government.
Fundamental Right to Privacy — Four Years of the Puttaswamy Judgment
Background
On 24 August 2017, in a nine-judge bench decision, the Indian Supreme Court located a fundamental right to privacy within the Indian Constitutional jurisprudence. Previously, the right to privacy has had a dubious existence in India’s judicial history, and it has been suggested that privacy is inherently a Western concept. However, essays by Ashna Ashesh, Vidushi Marda, and Bhairav Acharya — cited in the Puttaswamy judgment — dispelled this notion, by attempting to locate the constructs of privacy in Classical Hindu [link], and Islamic Laws [link]; and Acharya’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly, which highlighted the need for privacy jurisprudence to reflect theoretical clarity, and be sensitive to unique Indian contexts [link].
Through the six opinions in the Puttaswamy judgment, the Supreme Court discussed various aspects of the right to privacy, reading into it the constitutional values of dignity and liberty. In Amber Sinha’s three-part essay, he dissected these components of the right, discussing the sources, structure and scope of the right in detail. [link] Further, a visual guide prepared by Amber Sinha, and Pooja Saxena provides a rich story of privacy in independent India, as well as a visualisation of the various types of privacy the court located within the broader constitutional right. [link]
Privacy, Public Places and Surveillance
“Privacy attaches to the person and not to the place where it is associated.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy
The right to privacy initially focused on protecting “private” spaces. These included spaces such as the home, from state interference. This drew from the belief that “a person’s home is their castle”. However, this idea of privacy is not limited simply to a person’s home. Privacy rests in ‘person’ and not in ‘places’. Therefore, even outside one’s home, other spaces could also acquire the character of private spaces, and even public spaces can afford a degree of privacy.
In a paper for the Centre for Development Informatics, Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon discussed the wholesale implementation of CCTVs in New Delhi. They deconstructed the narrative that equates greater surveillance with greater safety, more so in the case of women’s safety. Borrowing from feminist approaches to surveillance and privacy, they focussed on lived experiencess of surveillance with a focus on women living in informal settlements in New Delhi to argue that the ‘gaze of CCTV’ is intersectionally mediated and cast upon those already marginalized. [link]
Similarly, in a three part blog series for AI Policy Exchange, Arindrajit Basu and Siddharth Sonkar explain Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS) while defining key privacy related legal and policy questions underpinning the adoption of AFRS. They go on to answer these questions by interrogating the existing data privacy laws in light of the mosaic theory of privacy, noting the dangers of ‘data-veillance’ and the need to recognize necessary safeguards. [link]
Biometrics
“The integrity of the body and the sanctity of the mind can exist on the foundation that each individual possesses an inalienable ability and right to preserve a private space in which the human personality can develop.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy
Biometrics was central to the Puttaswamy judgment, as it was the collection of biometric data by the government to build the Aadhaar system that triggered this case, and the urgent need to commit the State to guarding residents’ fundamental right to privacy.
Privacy of information
“Informational privacy is a facet of the right to privacy.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy
In the age of Big Data, the collection and analysis of personal data has tremendous economic value. However, these economic interests should not be pursued at the expense of personal privacy. Similarly, modern technology provides excessive opportunities for governments to monitor and survey the lives of citizens. Informed consent and meaningful choice while sharing information is central to the idea of informational privacy.
Based on publicly available submissions, press statements, and other media reports, Arindrajit Basu and Amber Sinha track the political evolution of the data protection ecosystem in India, in EPW Engage. They discuss how this has, and will continue to impact legislative and policy developments. [link]
Pandemic and privacy
Given the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the eager techno-solutionism displayed by the government in adopting invasive and potentially unconstitutional technologies during these times, the principles elucidated in Puttaswamy are now more important than ever in upholding our rights. As Lord Atkin had stated in his famous dissent in the case of Liversidge v Anderson: “amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent,” it is important to ensure that any potential solutions to the problems created by the pandemic are circumscribed by the constitution.
In an essay for the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), Amber Sinha, Pallavi Bedi and Aman Nair interrogate the techno-solutionist response underpinning the shifts towards the digital in the governance agenda of the Indian State in the last two decades. They focus on the government's vaccination efforts during the pandemic to ground their arguments highlighting the issues of accessibility and privacy. [link]
Writing for the Deccan Herald, Aman Nair and Pallavi Bedi note how pandemic technology infringes upon data privacy, resulting in surveillance and exclusion. They suggest that the trade-off between privacy and pandemic technologies is unjustified given India’s digital divide that makes digital-driven approaches inefficient. [link]
The practical implications of such techno-solutionism can be troubling. In this blog-post, for instance, Pallavi Bedi writes about the privacy concerns haunting the Co-Win platform noting the lack of privacy policies governing the app, lack of clarity vis-a-vis data sharing between different apps such as Co-Win and Aarogya Setu and how it would violate user consent if it is used to develop digital health IDS. [link] In another blog post, Divyank Katira compares the benefits of Digital Vaccine Certificates with regular paper-based ones while focussing on the privacy implications of their use with recommendations on how to make the technology more privacy-respecting. [link]
Moving beyond the concerns raised by the adoption of digital measures by the government, Vipul Kharbanda examines other measures, such as releasing the names of COVID positive patients, putting up notices/posters or barricades around the houses of patients. He analyzes these measures against the existing privacy jurisprudence, including that laid down by the Puttaswamy judgment [link], [link].
Finally, during this pandemic, governments across the world have employed aggressive technological measures to trace individuals and enforce quarantine, costing individuals their privacy in exchange for potential benefit to the collective public health. Mira Swaminathan and Shubhika Saluja document the lateral surveillance this had encouraged, with people keeping a close watch on their neighbours’ behaviours. [link]Wikimedia Wikimeet India 2021/Report
In March 2020, the whole world came to a standstill. What many deemed as a regular ‘flu’ turned out to be the pandemic that brought everyone to their knees. The things that we always did, we could no longer do them. We were all confined to our homes with no choice but to work online. Hanging out with friends, attending weddings, and being a part of the conferences and seminars suddenly became a part of the past. We started using the word unprecedented a lot.
Techno-solutionist Responses to COVID-19
The Indian state has increasingly adopted a digital approach to service delivery over the past decade, with vaccination being the latest area to be subsumed by this strategy. In the context of the need for universal vaccination, the limitations of the government’s vaccination platform Co-WIN need to be analysed.
Do We Really Need an App for That? Examining the Utility and Privacy Implications of India’s Digital Vaccine Certificates
We examine the purported benefits of digital vaccine certificates over regular paper-based ones and analyse the privacy implications of their use.
