Pathways to Higher Education

Digital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze

nishant — 2019-04-28T04:12:45Z

In the poll season, social media platforms thrive on wounded outrage disguised as politics.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on April 21, 2019.

There is palpable excitement as the most populous democracy in the world goes out to vote. Last election, which saw the saffron sweep, we realised the role of social media platforms in electoral politics. From the controversial selfie by the aspiring Prime Minister flaunting the lotus symbol, that was reported as violating the advertisement rules set by the Election Commission, to the mass mobilisation of ideology-based voters, orchestrated by automated bots and the hashtag brigades of #acchedin, there was no denying that digital strategies are going to form the backend of a robust political campaign.

In a country of hypervisible lynch mobs staged via WhatsApp, polarised hatred exacerbated by armies of trolls, and the fluency with which hate speech has been normalised on the tweetosphere, social media and digital apps are front and centre in this election. People are coming out of voting booths and, even before the exit pollsters catch them, they are making Snapchat videos and “I voted” selfies, clearly identifying the parties they support. The verified social media accounts of leading political parties are doubling down on their poll promises of a communal purge of “infiltrators”, divine curses for the heretic who doesn’t vote for the “party of gods”, and threats of profiling if a community voted for the correct party and subsequent dire consequences. The door-to-door campaigning of the past has obviously been replaced by the tweet-to-tweet mixture of threats, cajoling, and blood lust that seems to set the tone for our current political climate.

At the same time, the manifestos of the two leading coalitions, as well as the affidavits of the people running for office, are under deep public scrutiny. The BJP, in a Freudian blooper, announced itself as working for violence on women, incurring the sarcastic wrath of Twitter. One minister, who has been running through various cabinet positions, including education, was called to task to explain her wide repertoire of unverified degrees that change every voting season. Complaints against suspicious Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) have made themselves heard loudly on social-media discussion forums. And lately, the YouTube videos of people allegedly showing the easy removal of the indelible ink from the voting fingers, exploded into public view, jeopardising the integrity of the one-person-one-vote paradigm.

Social media, it would seem, is everywhere. And its ubiquity is ensuring that all stakeholders of the electoral process are performing for the social media gaze. Our leaders are talking in tweet-sized morsels, hoping to get their last messages in. The organisers of the massive process have taken to debunking false claims, providing verified information, and guiding people to their voting processes. The voters are not only wearing their party colours, but also canvassing for their favourite leaders, either through proclamations of patriotism or through emotional messages of voting against hate and discrimination. Voting groups are scrutinising and discussing the party manifestos and also the unexpected alliances coming into being in the quest of reaching the majority mark.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze

Manuel Beltrán - Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession

sumandro — 2019-04-01T08:00:05Z

Join us at the Delhi office of CIS on Thursday, April 4, at 5 pm for a talk by Manuel Beltrán, founder of the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), which explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD), their current project at IoHO, explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance.

Image credit: Manuel Beltrán

Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession

The Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Our work develops from a scenario in which forms of manual and intellectual labour traditionally performed by humans are increasingly automated by new technologies. In this context we investigate and challenge the socio-political and economic implications of new forms of labour, such as the production of data. The IoHO developed several projects exploring the production of data as a form of labour, as a different paradigm through which to interrogate and challenge dynamics of ownership over the production of data and the economic and governance objects emerging through it. Previous lines of inquiry around the framework of Data Labour Rights include Data Basic Income, Data Cooperative, Data Production Labour series, Investigative Discussion Sessions and Data Workers Union.

In this talk founder of the IoHO Manuel Beltrán, will introduce the work of the IoHO and discuss their current project Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD). CoD explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance. The project looks at the implications of how the dispossession of data unequally occurs in different contexts, through different means and for different purposes.

Instruments such as the Right Of Access provided by GDPR emerge from a European context but the flows of data operate in a transnational scale. We are exploring the potential and limits of this instrument in combination with others such as the Right To Information in India as tools to investigate and repossess our production of data across borders. We are particularly interested in feedback and discussing in how to think further about this last part.

Manuel Beltrán

Manuel is an artist and activist. He researches and lectures on contemporary art, activism, contemporary social movements, post-digital culture and new media. As an activist, he was involved in the Indignados movement in Spain, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and several forms of independent activism and cyber-activism in Europe and beyond. In 2012 he co-founded the art collective Plastic Crowds and since 2013 he is head and co-founder of the nomadic school and artistic organization Alternative Learning Tank. In 2015 he founded the Institute of Human Obsolescence, through which he explores the future of labour, the social and political implications regarding our relationship with technology and the economic and governance systems surrounding the production of data.

http://speculative.capital

https://dataworkers.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession

March 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-07-18T02:14:11Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for the month of March 2019.

Highlights for March 2019

The Indian Patent Office (IPO) on 1 March 2019, published a draft of the “Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure, Version 3.0”. CIS provided comments on patenting of computer related inventions.
The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team has submitted its proposal for the year 2019-2020 to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS-A2K has proposed to undertake content enrichment, skill development initiatives, cement partnership with existing partners and build relationships with new ones, and activities like Train-the-Trainer, Wikisource Conference, Wikimedia Summit India, Intensive Personal Wiki Training, supporting Indic Wikimedians through request page, etc.
Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organisation working on rejuvenation of rivers in India, has began documentation of rivers on Wiki, especially to draw attention to and mitigate the crisis of toxic deposits facing more than 40 rivers in India. The work was started by Jal Biradari, TBS’s Maharashtra based group, in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team of CIS. A report from the first pilot workshop conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, in Alwar, Rajasthan has been published.
With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. Saumyaa Naidu in a report has shared the learningsfrom the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.
Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok co-authored a policy brief titled Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India. The policy brief has recommended changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding external vulnerability reporting and disclosure.
Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla co-authored a White Paper titled 'The Localisation Gambit'. The paper was edited by Pranav M.B., Vipul Kharbanda and Amber Sinha. Anjanaa Aravindan provided research assistance. Government of India has drafted multiple policy instruments which dictate that certain types of data must be stored in servers located physically within the territory of India. The White Paper serves as a resource for stakeholders attempting to intervene in this debate and arrive at a workable solution where the objectives of data localisation are met through measures that have the least negative impact on India’s economic, political, and legal interests.
The Technology Law Forum at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) has published the Report on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium.This report is a compilation of all the speakers' speeches during the panel discussion. Shweta Mohandas was one of the eight speakers at the panel and the excerpts from her presentation has also been covered in this report.
CIS in its r@w blog featured an essay titled 'Users and the Internet' by Purbasha Auddy, part of a series on Studying Internet in India (2015); and audio recording of a session titled #SelfiesFromtheField which was part of the Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.

Jobs

CIS is hiring:

CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application (Only women candidates).
Internship - applications accepted throughout the year.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:

Recapturing the Commons (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 7, 2019).
Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 10, 2019).
Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 24, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Why entrepreneurs are wary of the new draft e-commerce policy (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; March 3, 2019).
'Website not found' pop-ups leave net activists fuming (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; March 6, 2019).
More urban Indian women are acting against offensive calls and text messages (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 8, 2019).
Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a ghost town for political ads in India so far (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 12, 2019).

Wie die chinesische Mega-App TikTok Indiens Wahlkampf beeinflussen könnte (Handelsblatt; March 13, 2019).
When laugh lines turn worry lines (K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj; Hindu; March 15, 2019).

Proposed Intermediary Liability Rules threat to privacy and free speech, global coalition tells MeitY (Zaheer Merchant; Medianama; March 18, 2019).
Now, police use apps to catch a criminal (Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma; Times of India; March 31, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Copyright and Patent

Access to Knowledge 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. We prepared the India report for the Consumers International IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty, questioned the demonisation of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Submission

Comments and Suggestions to the Draft Patent Manual March 2019 (Achal Prabhala, Feroz Ali, Ramya Sheshadri, Roshan John and Anubha Sinha; March 21, 2019).

Wikipdedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Train the Trainer program 2018 (Sailesh Patnaik; March 6, 2019).
The city of Bhubaneswar is going Open (Sailesh Patnaik; March 7, 2019).
Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way (Subodh Kulkarni; March 7, 2019).
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಶಿಕ್ಷಣ ಯೋಜನೆ ಸಮಾವೇಶ ಮತ್ತು ತರಬೇತಿಯ ವರದಿ (Ananth Subray; March 7, 2019).
Design and the Open Knowledge Movement (Saumyaa Naidu; March 31, 2019).

Event Organized

Wikimedia Summit India 2019 (Organized by CIS-A2K; New Delhi; March 16 - 17, 2019). CIS-A2K team organized a two-day Wikimedia Summit event for the participants taking part in the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin.

Openness

Our work in the Openness programme 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. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Event Organized

Talks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young (Organized by CIS; Bangalore; March 4, 2019).

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with 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.

Cyber Security

Research Paper

Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India (Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok; March 20, 2019). This is an update to our previously released paper titled "Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India". The full document can be accessed here.

Privacy

Research Paper

The Localisation Gambit: Unpacking policy moves for the sovereign control of data in India (Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla; March 19, 2019).

Participation in Events

Nullcon Security Conference (Organized by Nullcon; March 1 - 2, 2019; Goa). Karan Saini attended the event.
Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond” (Organized by TRAI; Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennaii; March 15, 2019).
DSCI-Infosys Roundtable (Organized by Infosys; Bangalore; March 25, 2019). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Free Speech and Expression

Event

Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy (Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 5, 2019).

Participation in Event

Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World (Organized by Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World and its partners; Bangkok; March 25 - 27, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Artificial Intelligence, ICT and IoT

Participation in Events

RFCs We Love: Transport & Apps Edition (Organized by India Internet Engineering Society; March 2, 2019; Go-Jek; Domlur, Bangalore). Gurshabad Grover was a speaker at this event.
Consultation on Draft E-commerce Policy (Organized by Alternative Law Forum and IT for Change; March 14, 2019; Tony Hall, Ashirwad , Off St.Marks Road; Bangalore). Arindrajit Basu attended the event.
International Conference on Justice Education:Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence (Organized by Nirma University; Ahmedabad; March 15 - 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu attended the conference.
AI for India Summit (Organized by Facebook; Leela Palace, Bengaluru; March 26, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event.
Roundtable on Consumer Experiences with New Technologies in APAC (Singapore) (Organized by Consumers International; Google, Singapore; March 26, 2019). Arindrajit Basu participated in the event.

Researchers at Work (RAW)

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 Entries

#CollectionAndIdentity (Ravi Shukla, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Mrutyunjay Mishra; March 2, 2019).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; March 2, 2019).
Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi (Sarah McKeever; March 12, 2019).
#CampusCampaigns: User Perceptions in Pre-digital and Digital Eras (Arjun Ghosh; March 12, 2019).
Taking Open Science Offline (Shreyashi Ray; March 21, 2019).

Participation in Event

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium (Organized by Michigan State University; March 21 - 22, 2019). P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives.

About CIS

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.

► Follow us elsewhere

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E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
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► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► 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 sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (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 tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2019-newsletter

Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:19:29Z

The day when three social-media apps refused to load.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 24, 2019.

It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.

Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.

That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.

While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?

This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.

We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.

It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.

As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium

sneha-pp — 2019-05-03T09:41:53Z

P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives at the Global Digital Humanities Symposium organised by Michigan State University on March 21-22, 2019.

Puthiya Purayil Sneha (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India)

The archive has been an important context for conversations around digital humanities (DH) in India, as it has been globally. The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors, including state institutions (National Museum, National Cultural Audio-Visual Archive (IGNCA)) universities (Jadavpur University, Ambedkar University,) and individual and collaborative efforts (Indian Memory Project, Indiancine.ma ) to name a few. The emergence of new fields like DH, digital cultures and cultural analytics also indicate several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, on the one hand alluding to the potential offered by democratizing technologies, but also reflecting persistent challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines.

The growth of new areas of study and creative practice like DH has brought about a renewed focus on the creation of digital corpora, and the need for new technologies and methods of research, more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. The contexts of these questions are however much wider, located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. Even as the colonial imagination of state archives remains prevalent in India, digital archival initiatives facilitated by infrastructure such as open source content management systems and tools like web annotation have opened up spaces for alternate narratives. Drawing upon excerpts from a report on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in archival practices, this presentation seeks to understand the politics of digital archiving in a postcolonial context, and how it informs larger trajectories of digitalisation, and the growth of fields like DH in India today.

For more info click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium

Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:12:30Z

The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 10, 2019.

I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.

It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.

This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.

Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.

Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.

When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.

Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.

Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward

What I learned from going offline for 48 hours

nishant — 2019-03-14T16:21:29Z

A weekend without the internet shows just how much control we surrender to online chatter.

The article was published by Indian Express on February 24, 2019.

In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices.

When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep.

I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important occasions that I had missed. Despite the fact that I had not produced any content, not initiated any conversations, and not engaged with any material, I had more than 400 notifications from five main social media apps, where people had tagged me, poked me and pulled me into long conversation threads that I could no longer recognise or trace back.

An equal number of friendly algorithms had curated things that needed my attention and were warning me that I might have missed out on the most life-changing moments. My personal messaging system was filled with group messages, those from family and friends who were not talking to me but making me a witness to their conversations. There were also a few frantic messages, first checking if the messages were being delivered, then wondering why I was not responding, and then going into a rage about my rudeness for not even informing them that I wouldn’t be replying to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours

Data Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2019-12-30T16:44:32Z

In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices unveils the gendered power differentials wedded into taken-for-granted “benign” monitoring processes. The unpacking of the Mother and Child Tracking System and the National Health Stack reveals the neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian state.

The article was first published by EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 6, on 9 February 2019.

Framing Reproductive Health as a Surveillance Question

The approach of the postcolonial Indian state to healthcare has been Malthusian, with the prioritisation of family planning and birth control (Hodges 2004). Supported by the notion of socio-economic development arising out of a “modernisation” paradigm, the target-based approach to achieving reduced fertility rates has shaped India’s reproductive and child health (RCH) programme (Simon-Kumar 2006).

This is also the context in which India’s abortion law, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, was framed in 1971, placing the decisional privacy of women seeking abortions in the hands of registered medical practitioners. The framing of the MTP act invisibilises females seeking abortions for non-medical reasons within the legal framework. The exclusionary provisions only exacerbated existing gaps in health provisioning, as access to safe and legal abortions had already been curtailed by severe geographic inequalities in funding, infrastructure, and human resources. The state has concomitantly been unable to meet contraceptive needs of married couples or reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in large parts of the country, mediating access along the lines of class, social status, education, and age (Sanneving et al 2013).

While the official narrative around the RCH programme transitioned to focus on universal access to healthcare in the 1990s, the target-based approach continues to shape the reality on the ground. The provision of reproductive healthcare has been deeply unequal and, in some cases, in hospitals. These targets have been known to be met through the practice of forced, and often unsafe, sterilisation, in conditions of absence of adequate provisions or trained professionals, pre-sterilisation counselling, or alternative forms of contraception (Sama and PLD 2018). Further, patients have regularly been provided cash incentives, foreclosing the notion of free consent, especially given that the target population of these camps has been women from marginalised economic classes in rural India.

Placing surveillance studies within a feminist praxis allows us to frame the reproductive health landscape as more than just an ill-conceived, benign monitoring structure. The critical lens becomes useful for highlighting that taken-for-granted structures of monitoring are wedded with power differentials: genetic screening in fertility clinics, identification documents such as birth certificates, and full-body screeners are just some of the manifestations of this (Adrejevic 2015). Emerging conversations around feminist surveillance studies highlight that these data systems are neither benign nor free of gendered implications (Andrejevic 2015). In continual remaking of the social, corporeal body as a data actor in society, such practices render some bodies normative and obfuscate others, based on categorisations put in place by the surveiller.

In fact, the history of surveillance can be traced back to the colonial state where it took the form of systematic sexual and gendered violence enacted upon indigenous populations in order to render them compliant (Rifkin 2011; Morgensen 2011). Surveillance, then, manifests as a “scientific” rationalisation of complex social hieroglyphs (such as reproductive health) into formats enabling administrative interventions by the modern state. Lyon (2001) has also emphasised how the body emerged as the site of surveillance in order for the disciplining of the “irrational, sensual body”—essential to the functioning of the modern nation-state—to effectively happen.

Questioning the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Big Data for Development (BD4D) Rhetoric

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and data-driven approaches to the development of a robust health information system, and by extension, welfare, have been offered as solutions to these inequities and exclusions in access to maternal and reproductive healthcare in the country.

The move towards data-driven development in the country commenced with the introduction of the Health Management Information System in Andhra Pradesh in 2008, and the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) nationally in 2011. These are reproductive health information systems (HIS) that collect granular data about each pregnancy from the antenatal to the post-natal period, at the level of each sub-centre as well as primary and community health centre. The introduction of HIS comprised cross-sectoral digitisation measures that were a part of the larger national push towards e-governance; along with health, thirty other distinct areas of governance, from land records to banking to employment, were identified for this move towards the digitalised provisioning of services (MeitY 2015).

The HIS have been seen as playing a critical role in the ecosystem of health service provision globally. HIS-based interventions in reproductive health programming have been envisioned as a means of: (i) improving access to services in the context of a healthcare system ridden with inequalities; (ii) improving the quality of services provided, and (iii) producing better quality data to facilitate the objectives of India’s RCH programme, including family planning and population control. Accordingly, starting 2018, the MCTS is being replaced by the RCH portal in a phased manner. The RCH portal, in areas where the ANMOL (ANM Online) application has been introduced, captures data real-time through tablets provided to health workers (MoHFW 2015).

A proposal to mandatorily link the Aadhaar with data on pregnancies and abortions through the MCTS/RCH has been made by the union minister for Women and Child Development as a deterrent to gender-biased sex selection (Tembhekar 2016). The proposal stems from the prohibition of gender-biased sex selection provided under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994. The approach taken so far under the PCPNDT Act, 2014 has been to regulate the use of technologies involved in sex determination. However, the steady decline in the national sex ratio since the passage of the PCPNDT Act provides a clear indication that the regulation of such technology has been largely ineffective. A national policy linking Aadhaar with abortions would be aimed at discouraging gender-biased sex selection through state surveillance, in direct violation of a female’s right to decisional privacy with regards to their own body.

Linking Aadhaar would also be used as a mechanism to enable direct benefit transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Linking reproductive health services to the Aadhaar ecosystem has been critiqued because it is exclusionary towards women with legitimate claims towards abortions and other reproductive services and benefits, and it heightens the risk of data breaches in a cultural fabric that already stigmatises abortions. The bodies on which this stigma is disproportionately placed, unmarried or disabled females, for instance, experience the harms of visibility through centralised surveillance mechanisms more acutely than others by being penalised for their deviance from cultural expectations. This is in accordance with the theory of "data extremes,” wherein marginalised communities are seen as living on the extremes of data capture, leading to a data regime that either refuses to recognise them as legitimate entities or subjects them to overpolicing in order to discipline deviance (Arora 2016). In both developed and developing contexts, the broader purpose of identity management has largely been to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate actors within a population, either within the framework of security or welfare.

Potential Harms of the Data Model of Reproductive Health Provisioning

Informational privacy and decisional privacy are critically shaped by data flows and security within the MCTS/RCH. No standards for data sharing and storage, or anonymisation and encryption of data have been implemented despite role-based authentication (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011). The risks of this architectural design are further amplified in the context of the RCH/ANMOL where data is captured real-time. In the absence of adequate safeguards against data leaks, real-time data capture risks the publicising of reproductive health choices in an already stigmatised environment. This opens up avenues for further dilution of autonomy in making future reproductive health choices.

Several core principles of informational privacy, such as limitations regarding data collection and usage, or informed consent, also need to be reworked within this context.^[1] For instance, the centrality of the requirement of “free, informed consent” by an individual would need to be replaced by other models, especially in the context of reproductive health of rape survivors who are vulnerable and therefore unable to exercise full agency. The ability to make a free and informed choice, already dismantled in the context of contemporary data regimes, gets further precluded in such contexts. The constraints on privacy in decisions regarding the body are then replicated in the domain of reproductive data collection.

What is uniform across these digitisation initiatives is their treatment of maternal and reproductive health as solely a medical event, framed as a data scarcity problem. In doing so, they tend to amplify the understanding of reproductive health through measurable indicators that ignore social determinants of health. For instance, several studies conducted in the rural Indian context have shown that the degree of women’s autonomy influences the degree of usage of pregnancy care, and that the uptake of pregnancy care was associated with village-level indicators such as economic development, provisioning of basic infrastructure and social cohesion. These contextual factors get overridden in pervasive surveillance systems that treat reproductive healthcare as comprising only of measurable indicators and behaviours, that are dependent on individual behaviour of practitioners and women themselves, rather than structural gaps within the system.

While traditionally associated with state governance, the contemporary surveillance regime is experienced as distinct from its earlier forms due to its reliance on a nexus between surveillance by the state and private institutions and actors, with both legal frameworks and material apparatuses for data collection and sharing (Shepherd 2017). As with historical forms of surveillance, the harms of contemporary data regimes accrue disproportionately among already marginalised and dissenting communities and individuals. Data-driven surveillance has been critiqued for its excesses in multiple contexts globally, including in the domains of predictive policing, health management, and targeted advertising (Mason 2015). In the attempts to achieve these objectives, surveillance systems have been criticised for their reliance on replicating past patterns, reifying proximity to a hetero-patriarchal norm (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Under data-driven surveillance systems, this proximity informs the preexisting boxes of identity for which algorithmic representations of the individual are formed. The boxes are defined contingent on the distinct objectives of the particular surveillance project, collating disparate pieces of data flows and resulting in the recasting of the singular offline self into various 'data doubles' (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Refractive, rather than reflective, the data doubles have implications for the physical, embodied life of individual with an increasing number of service provisioning relying on the data doubles (Lyon 2001). Consider, for instance, apps on menstruation, fertility, and health, and wearables such as fitness trackers and pacers, that support corporate agendas around what a woman’s healthy body should look, be or behave like (Lupton 2014). Once viewed through the lens of power relations, the fetishised, apolitical notion of the data “revolution” gives way to what we may better understand as “dataveillance.”

Towards a Networked State and a Neo-liberal Citizen

Following in this tradition of ICT being treated as the solution to problems plaguing India’s public health information system, a larger, all-pervasive healthcare ecosystem is now being proposed by the Indian state (NITI Aayog 2018). Termed the National Health Stack, it seeks to create a centralised electronic repository of health records of Indian citizens with the aim of capturing every instance of healthcare service usage. Among other functions, it also envisions a platform for the provisioning of health and wellness-based services that may be dispensed by public or private actors in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage. By allowing private parties to utilise the data collected through pullable open application program interfaces (APIs), it also fits within the larger framework of the National Health Policy 2017 that envisions the private sector playing a significant role in the provision of healthcare in India. It also then fits within the state–private sector nexus that characterises dataveillance. This, in turn, follows broader trends towards market-driven solutions and private financing of health sector reform measures that have already had profound consequences on the political economy of healthcare worldwide (Joe et al 2018).

These initiatives are, in many ways, emblematic of the growing adoption of network governance reform by the Indian state (Newman 2001). This is a stark shift from its traditional posturing as the hegemonic sovereign nation state. This shift entails the delayering from large, hierarchical and unitary government systems to horizontally arranged, more flexible, relatively dispersed systems.^[2] The former govern through the power of rules and law, while the latter take the shape of self-regulating networks such as public–private contractual arrangements (Snellen 2005). ICTs have been posited as an effective tool in enabling the transition to network governance by enhancing local governance and interactive policymaking enabling the co-production of knowledge (Ferlie et al 2011). The development of these capabilities is also critical to addressing “wicked problems” such as healthcare (Rittel and Webber 1973).^[3] The application of the techno-deterministic, data-driven model to reproductive healthcare provision, then, resembles a fetishised approach to technological change. The NHSRC describes this as the collection of data without an objective, leading to a disproportional burden on data collection over use (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011).

The blurring of the functions of state and private actors is reflective of the neo-liberal ethic, which produces new practices of governmentality. Within the neo-liberal framework of reproductive healthcare, the citizen is constructed as an individual actor, with agency over and responsibility for their own health and well-being (Maturo et al 2016).

“Quantified Self” of the Neo-liberal Citizen

Nowhere can the manifestation of this neo-liberal citizen can be seen as clearly as in the “quantified self” movement. The quantified self movement refers to the emergence of a whole range of apps that enable the user to track bodily functions and record data to achieve wellness and health goals, including menstruation, fertility, pregnancies, and health indicators in the mother and baby. Lupton (2015) labels this as the emergence of the “digitised reproductive citizen,” who is expected to be attentive to her fertility and sexual behaviour to achieve better reproductive health goals. The practice of collecting data around reproductive health is not new to the individual or the state, as has been demonstrated by the discussion above. What is new in this regime of datafication under the self-tracking movement is the monetisation of reproductive health data by private actors, the labour for which is performed by the user. Focusing on embodiment draws attention to different kinds of exploitation engendered by reproductive health apps. Not only is data about the body collected and sold, the unpaid labour for collection is extracted from the user. The reproductive body can then be understood as a cyborg, or a woman-machine hybrid, systematically digitising its bodily functions for profit-making within the capitalist (re)production machine (Fotoloulou 2016). Accordingly, all major reproductive health tracking apps have a business model that relies on selling information about users for direct marketing of products around reproductive health and well-being (Felizi and Varon nd).

As has been pointed out in the case of big data more broadly, reproductive health applications (apps) facilitate the visibility of the female reproductive body in the public domain. Supplying anonymised data sets to medical researchers and universities fills some of the historical gaps in research around the female body and reproductive health. Reproductive and sexual health tracking apps globally provide their users a platform to engage with biomedical information around sexual and reproductive health. Through group chats on the platform, they are also able to engage with experiential knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. This could also help form transnational networks of solidarity around the body and health (Fotopoulou 2016).

This radical potential of network-building around reproductive and sexual health is, however, tempered to a large extent by the reconfiguration of gendered stereotypes through these apps. In a study on reproductive health apps on Google Play Store, Lupton (2014) finds that products targeted towards female users are marketed through the discourse of risk and vulnerability, while those targeted towards male users are framed within that of virility. Apart from reiterating gendered stereotypes around the male and female body, such a discourse assumes that the entire labour of family planning is performed by females. This same is the case with the MCTS/RCH.

Technological interventions such as reproductive health apps as well as HIS are based on the assumption that females have perfect control over decisions regarding their own bodies and reproductive health, despite this being disproved in India. The Guttmacher Institute (2014) has found that 60% of women in India report not having control over decisions regarding their own healthcare. The failure to account for the husband or the family as stakeholder in decision-making around reproductive health has been a historical failure of the family planning programme in India, and is now being replicated in other modalities. This notion of an autonomous citizen who is able to take responsibility of their own reproductive health and well-being does not hold true in the Indian context. It can even be seen as marginalising females who have already been excluded from the reproductive health system, as they are held responsible for their own inability to access healthcare.

Concluding Remarks

The interplay that emerges between reproductive health surveillance and data infrastructures is a complex one. It requires the careful positioning of the political nature of data collection and processing as well as its hetero-patriarchal and colonial legacies, within the need for effective utilisation of data for achieving developmental goals. Assessing this discourse through a feminist lens identifies the web of power relations in data regimes. This problematises narratives of technological solutions for welfare provision.

The reproductive healthcare framework in India then offers up a useful case study to assess these concerns. The growing adoption of ICT-based surveillance tools to equalise access to healthcare needs to be understood in the socio-economic, legal, and cultural context where these tools are being implemented. Increased surveillance has historically been associated with causing the structural gendered violence that it is now being offered as a solution to. This is a function of normative standards being constructed for reproductive behaviour that necessarily leave out broader definitions of reproductive health and welfare when viewed through a feminist lens. Within the larger context of health policymaking in India, moves towards privatisation then demonstrate the peculiarity of dataveillance as it functions through an unaccountable and pervasive overlapping of state and private surveillance practises. It remains to be seen how these trends in ICT-driven health policies affect access to reproductive rights and decisional privacy for millions of females in India and other parts of the global South.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india

India’s proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese laws

nishant — 2019-02-04T02:05:12Z

The proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese restrictions. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unquestioningly expand the remit of the government.

The article was published in Indian Express on January 27, 2019,

Almost a decade ago, I spent a year living in Shanghai, as part of a research fellowship. I spent time with digital cultural producers and wrote about the ways in which they navigated the restrictive terrains of the web. One of the groups that I was working with, introduced me to a stuffed toy called Cao Ni Ma which, spoken one way means, “mud grass horse”. But the same words with a different tone resulted into an offensive mother-related expletive. The Cao Ni Ma, that year, was the best-selling toy in the Chinese market during the new year celebrations, and had broken the internet with memes, videos, and imaginary pictures that emerged once it was conceived in a prank encyclopedia page titled the “10 legendary obscene beasts of China”. The humour was juvenile to my eyes, reminiscent of dorm-room talk as well as old internet discussion forums where tech nerds came with the keyword Pr0n or Prawn to escape the prying eyes of primitive censorship algorithms.

However, as I quickly learned, this was not just fun and games. The reason why this entire thing had gone viral was because China had, by then, established a complete control over what can and cannot be said online. Chinese internet intermediaries — like Baidu, which run the Chinese version of Wikipedia, for instance — had not only complied but also internalised the censoring of all speech that was found offensive to the sovereignty and integrity of the country. This included critique of the state and political leaders, a voicing of complaint about poor infrastructure or governance, any expression of desire or profanity that would be socially unacceptable. Intermediaries in China, even before the social credit systems were announced, were mandated and enabled to remove all content that they thought might “shatter the harmony” of the “Chinese way of living”.

I didn’t realise how deep this regulation of the intermediaries goes till I accidentally ended up writing about Cao Ni Ma, and the playfulness of their subversion on my research blog. It was, in fact, in an academic paper that I presented at a conference in Taiwan and so I had announced it on my social media. While I was in Taiwan, my email suddenly started singing. My host colleagues were concerned about my well-being. My departmental colleagues were asking me about my whereabouts. The dean of the faculty asked me to stay back in Taiwan longer and to not come back to Shanghai till I heard from him again. It took me six more days before I was finally reunited with my guest house, and all my stuff. Upon return, I had friendly visits from five different committees, ranging from academic ethics panel that had approved my research project to the immigration and police who wanted to know more about my research.

Once the ordeal was over — though I was warned that another infringement would not be tolerated — I kept on re-reading what I had written to figure out what could have triggered this amount of anxiety. When I asked a Chinese friend, she looked at me with telling eyes. “It is not what you have written but the fact that you have written about it as well. You can’t write about this because it undermines the government”. The regulation of intermediaries was not about making the internet safe, keeping hate speech at bay, and building a more inclusive web. It was purely and simply about determining who can say what about what. There were no clear guidelines because anything that could be interpreted as unwanted automatically became unwanted.

The current Indian government has proposed a new internet bill that seeks to mimic the Chinese control of information and voices to the T. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unless resisted and critiqued, unquestioningly expands the remit of the government, through private intermediaries, to control what we can see and read, and also what we can say and share. It is yet another assault in an atmosphere where newspapers, civil society organisations, political protestors, and common persons are targeted, bullied, and intimidated into silence.

Without public support and attention, this law is most likely going to pass. I am making a list of all the things we might no longer be able to say on the web — and also obsessively looking at the Instagram egg while I still can, because just like the midday meal, the egg might soon disappear from our vegetarian webs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-january-27-2019-indias-proposed-new-internet-bill-is-as-repressive-as-the-worst-of-chinese-laws

January 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-03-03T16:34:21Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcomes you to the first issue of its e-Newsletter for 2019.

The CIS newsletter aims to highlight developments in copyright and patent, free speech and expression, privacy, cyber security, telecom, etc. as well as Industry 4.0, big data, additive manufacturing and so on which are revolutionizing and moving the digital world forward. Through this newsletter we look to engage you with our research and build a strong bond by bringing you insightful articles and blog posts which will be beneficial for you and your business. Throughout the year we will send you stories and insights from our board, staff and community leaders. We welcome your feedback, suggestions or comments regarding our newsletter or any other aspect of our research.

Welcome to r@w blog!

CIS researchers@work programme (RAW) is delighted to announce the launch of its new blog hosted on Medium. The RAW blog will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society. The blog will also feature highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.

Highlights for January 2019

Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi have produced a research paper that contextualises the narrative around Industry 4.0 and the future of work with reference to the female labour force in India.
Gurshabad Grover, Nikhil Srinath and Aayush Rathi (with inputs from Anubha Sinha and Sai Shakti) presented a response to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-The-Top (OTT) Communication Services. CIS appreciates the continual efforts of TRAI to have consultations on the regulatory framework that should be applicable to OTT services and Telecom Service Providers (TSPs).
Pranesh Prakash, Karan Saini and Elonnai Hickok authored a policy brief that recommends several changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding coordinated vulnerability disclosure (“CVD”) for improving the overarching information and cyber security posture of the country.
The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace, a multi-stakeholder initiative comprised of eminent individuals across the globe opened a public comment procedure to solicit comments and obtain additional feedback. Arindrajit Basu, Gurshabad Grover and Elonnai Hickok responded to the public call-offering comments on all six norms and proposing two further norms.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:

How to make EVMs hack-proof, and elections more trustworthy (Pranesh Prakash; Times of India; December 9, 2018).
Registering for Aadhaar in 2019 (Sunil Abraham; Business Standard; January 2, 2019).
The DNA Bill has a sequence of problems that need to be resolved (Shweta Mohandas and Elonnai Hickok; Newslaundry; January 15, 2019).
India should reconsider its proposed regulation of online content (Gurshabad Grover; Hindustan Times; January 24, 2019). Akriti Bopanna and Aayush Rathi provided feedback for the article.
India’s proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese laws (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 27, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Creeped out by Netflix's 'You'? Here's how you can avoid online stalkers, data thieves (Sanyukta Dharmadhikari; The News Minute; January 10, 2019).
Civic activism over WhatsApp and stories of and from cab drivers are part of a new narrative in Bengaluru (Sowmya Rajaram; Bangalore Mirror; January 13, 2019).
They know where you are (Tini Sara Anien; Deccan Herald; January 17, 2019).
Oyo Hotels’ Real-Time Digital Record Database Sparks Privacy Fears (Nishant Sharma; Bloomberg Quint; January 16, 2019).
Is the viral #10YearChallenge just another sneaky way for tech firms to gather users’ personal data? (Devarsi Ghosh; Scroll.in; January 18, 2019).
Google Gives Wikimedia Millions—Plus Machine Learning Tools (Wired; January 22, 2019).
New movies lose out due to piracy (Surupasree Sarmmah; Deccan Herald; January 23, 2019).
Submitted Your Biometrics for Aadhaar? Here’s How You Can Lock/Unlock That Data (Vidya Raja; Better India; January 24, 2019).
India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers (Zack Whittaker; Tech Crunch; January 30, 2019).
Open standards can disrupt Facebook’s messaging monopoly (Abhimanyu Ghoshal; The Next Web; January 30, 2019).
Conmen seed fake phone numbers in Google to trap people looking for customer care details (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; January 30, 2019).
Amazon and Walmart are about to take a big hit in India (Q13 Fox; January 31, 2019).

Internet Governance

Cyber Security

Submission

Response to GCSC on Request for Consultation: Norm Package Singapore (Gurshabad Grover, Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; January 22, 2019).

Policy Brief

Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India (Pranesh Prakash; Karan Saini and Elonnai Hickok; January 23, 2019).

Privacy

Submission

CIS Submission to UN High Level Panel on Digital Co-operation (Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Arindrajit Basu and Elonnai Hickok; January 30, 2019).

Gender

Research Paper

A Gendered Future of Work (Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi; December 19, 2018).

Event Organized

RFCs We Love meetup (Organized by CIS and India Internet Engineering Society; CIS, Bangalore; January 19, 2019).

Events Participated / Partnered In

Webinar on the draft Intermediary Guidelines Amendment Rules (Organized by CCAOI and the ISOC Delhi Chapter; New Delhi; January 10, 2019). Gurshabad Grover was a discussant in the panel.
MediaNama roundtables on intermediary liability rules (St. Marks Hotel, Bangalore; January 25, 2019). CIS was a community partner. Gurshabad Grover participated in the meeting.
DSCI's Bangalore chapter meet (Organized by Data Security Council of India; Bangalore; January 29, 2019). Karan Saini and Gurshabad Grover participated in the meet.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions.

Submission

Response to TRAI Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-The-Top (OTT) Communication Services (Gurshabad Grover, Nikhil Srinath and Aayush Rathi with inputs from Anubha Sinha and Sai Shakti; January 10, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

Announcement

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan (P.P. Sneha; January 9, 2019).

About CIS

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-19-newsletter

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List, Jan 30 - Feb 1, Lamakaan

sneha-pp — 2019-01-31T06:41:38Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions. IRC19 will be organised in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, during January 30 - February 1, 2019.

Venue: Lamakaan, Off Road 1, Near GVK Mall, Banjara Hills, Hyderabad 500034

Location: Google Maps

Conference Programme: Read (SlideShare) and Download (PDF)

Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy: Download (PDF)

Poster: Download (JPG)

Registration: Directly at the venue, it is a free and open conference

IRC19: #List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invited sessions and papers that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list* - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

Papers

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature - Brindaalakshmi.K

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods - Gayas Eapen

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC - Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

About the IRC Series

Researchers and practitioners across the domains of arts, humanities, and social sciences have attempted to understand life on the internet, or life after the internet, and the way digital technologies mediate various aspects of our being today. These attempts have in turn raised new questions around understanding of digital objects, online lives, and virtual networks, and have contributed to complicating disciplinary assumptions, methods, conceptualisations, and boundaries.

The researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) initiated the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) series to address these concerns, and to create an annual temporary space in India, for internet researchers to gather and share experiences.

The IRC series is driven by the following interests:

creating discussion spaces for researchers and practitioners studying internet in India and in other comparable regions,
foregrounding the multiplicity, hierarchies, tensions, and urgencies of the digital sites and users in India,
accounting for the various layers, conceptual and material, of experiences and usages of internet and networked digital media in India, and
exploring and practicing new modes of research and documentation necessitated by new (digital) objects of power/knowledge.

The first edition of the Internet Researchers' Conference series was held in February 2016. It was hosted by the Centre for Political Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and was supported by the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund. The second Internet Researchers' Conference was organised in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) campus on March 03-05, 2017. The third Internet Researchers' Conference was organised at the Sambhaavnaa Institute, Kandbari (Himachal Pradesh) during February 22-24, 2018, and the theme of the conference was *offline*.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list

Welcome to r@w blog!

sneha-pp — 2019-01-02T11:48:04Z

We from the researchers@work programme at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are delighted to announce the launch of our new blog, hosted on Medium. It will feature works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media, and society; and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme.

r@w blog: Visit (Medium)

A space for reflections on internet and society, r@w blog is also an attempt to facilitate conversations around contemporary debates and foster creative engagement with research and practice through text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other media forms offered by the internet.

r@w blog opens with an essay on ‘Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance, and Activism in the Indian IT & ITES Industry’ by Rianka Roy - as part of an essay series exploring social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, and aesthetic dimensions of the "offline" - and audio recording from a session titled #ILoveYou by Dhiren Borisa and Dhrubo Jyoti, which was part of the Internet Researchers’ Conference 2018 - #Offline.

We will publish our (including commissioned/supported) writings and works on this blog, as well as submitted and compiled materials. Please write to raw[at]cis-india[dot]org to submit your works to be considered for publication. Copyright to all material published on this blog are owned by CIS and author(s) concerned, and they are shared under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/welcome-to-raw-blog

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers

sneha-pp — 2019-01-21T12:11:35Z

Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - List of Proposed Sessions

Selected Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty (9 votes)

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo (9 votes)

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal (9 votes)

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain (9 votes)

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti (9 votes)

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha (9 votes)

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince (7 votes)

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose (7 votes)

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana (10 votes)

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh (11 votes)

Selected Papers

Brindaalakshmi.K

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature

In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.

One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others [1]. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.

This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.

[1] Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018

Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.

Gayas Eapen

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods

Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.

As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.

In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.

I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.

Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.

Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC

This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.

Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Notes

The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the Call for Sessions page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers

December 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-01-08T16:15:38Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2018:

Highlights

CIS signed a MoU with Odia Virtual Academy to work on drafting an open content policy for the state, to promote use of Wikimedia projects by various user types and to ensure sustainability of Wikimedia projects, and to facilitate development of relevant free and open source software projects. This partnership between OVA and CIS will be carried out from December 2018 to November 2019.
Natalia Khaniejo, in a four-part report has attempted to document the various approaches that are being adopted by different stakeholders towards incentivizing cybersecurity and the economic challenges of implementing the same. The literature review was edited by Amber Sinha.
Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah created an infographic which has mapped the key stakeholder, areas of focus and threat vectors that impact cybersecurity policy in India. The authors have stated that broadly policy-makers should concentrate on establishing a framework where individuals feel secure and trust the growing digital ecosystem.
In April 2018 European Union issued the proposal for a new regime dealing with cross border sharing of data and information by issuing two draft instruments, an E-evidence Regulation (“Regulation”) and an E-evidence Directive (“Directive”), (together the “E-evidence Proposal”). Vipul Kharbanda has analysed how service providers based in India whose services are also available in Europe would be affected by these proposals.
Feminist research methodology is a vast body of knowledge, spanning across multiple disciplines including sociology, media studies, and critical legal studies. A literature review by Ambika Tandon aims to understand key aspects of feminist methodology across these disciplines, with a particular focus on research on technology and its interaction with society.
CIS and design collective Design Beku came together for a workshop on Illustrations and Visual Representations of Cybersecurity. The authors Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu have stated that images play a vital role in the public’s perception of cybercrime and cybersecurity.
A list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) has been published. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019.

Articles

Private-public partnership for cyber security (Arindrajit Basu; Hindu Businessline; December 24, 2018).
Is the new ‘interception’ order old wine in a new bottle? (Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda, Shweta Mohandas and Pranav M. Bidare; Newslaundry.com; December 27, 2018).
Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; December 30, 2018).

Media Coverage

Many sites bypass porn ban (Rajitha Menon; Deccan Herald; December 6, 2018).
How data privacy and governance issues have battered Facebook ahead of 2019 polls (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; December 6, 2018).
Is Aadhaar Essential To Achieve Error-Free Electoral Rolls? (Bloomberg Quint; December 16, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance threatens right to privacy, experts say (Abhishek Dey; Scroll.in; December 22, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance is backed by law – but the law lacks adequate safeguards (Nehaa Chaudhari and Tuhina Joshi; Scroll.in; December 23, 2018).
Ten Indian government agencies can now snoop on people’s internet data (David Spenser; VPN Compare; December 24, 2018).
Big Brother is here: Amid snooping row, govt report says monitoring system 'practically complete' (Keerthana Sankaran; New Indian Express; December 26, 2018).
MHA snoop order & bid to amend IT rules: China-like clampdown or tracking unlawful content? (Fatima Khan; The Print December 28, 2018).
The dark side of future tech: Where are we headed on privacy, security, truth? (Dipanjan Sinha; Hindustan Times; December 29, 2018).
The constitutionality of MHA surveillance order (Nehaa Chaudhari; Asian Age; December 30, 2018).

Access to Knowledge

Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Punjabi Wikisource Training Workshop, Patiala (Jayanta Nath; December 6, 2018).
Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 (Jayanta Nath; December 8, 2019).
CIS Signs MoU with Odia Virtual Academy (Sailesh Patnaik; December 19, 2018).

Openness

Guest Lecture

Lecture on Open Access and Open Content Licensing at ICAR (short course) (Organized by ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR) a constituent establishment of Indian Council of Agricultural Research; November 13 - 22, 2018). Anubha Sinha delivered a lecture.

Internet Governance

Privacy

Guest Lecture

Teaching at Shristi Interlude (Organised by Shristi; Bangalore; December 7, 2018). Shweta Mohandas participated as a mentor.

Gender

Research Paper

Feminist Methodology in Technology Research: A Literature Review (Ambika Tandon with contributions from Mukta Joshi; research assistance by by Kumarjeet Ray and Navya Sharma; design by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

Event Report on Intermediary Liability and Gender Based Violence (Akriti Bopanna; edited by Ambika Tandon; December 20, 2018).

Participation in Event

International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2018 (Co-organized by Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Sama; St. John's Medical College; Bangalore; December 3 - 5, 2018). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon were speakers at the event.

Cyber Security

Research Papers

European E-Evidence Proposal and Indian Law (Vipul Kharbanda; December 23, 2018).
Economics of Cybersecurity: Literature Review Compendium (Natalia Khaniejo; edited by Amber Sinha; December 31, 2018).

Infographic

Mapping cybersecurity in India: An infographic (information contributed by Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah; designed by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

A Critical Look at the Visual Representation of Cybersecurity (Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu; December 11, 2018).

Participation in Event

India-China Tech Forum 2018 (Organised by ORF and Peking University at the Ji Xianlin Centre for India-China Studies; Mumbai; December 11 - 12, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.

Artificial Intelligence

Participation in Event

Future Tech and Future Law (Organised by Dept. of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka; Palace Grounds; Bangalore; November 29 - December 1, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.
AI for Social Good Summit (Co-organised by Google AI and United Nations ESCAP; Bangkok; December 13, 2018).

Researchers at Work

Selected Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers (P.P. Sneha; January 2, 2019).

-----------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------
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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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2018-newsletter

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot