Centre for Internet & Society

Draft Circular on Digital Lending – Transparency in Aggregation of Loan Products from Multiple Lenders

by Garima Agrawal

CIS is grateful for the opportunity to submit comments on the “Draft Circular on Digital Lending: Transparency in Aggregation of Loan Products from Multiple Lenders” to the Reserve Bank of India. We welcome the opportunity provided to comment on the guidelines, and we hope that the final guidelines will consider the interests of all the stakeholders to ensure that it protects the privacy and digital rights of all consumers, including marginalised and vulnerable users, while encouraging innovation and improved service delivery in the fintech ecosystem. Our comments look at two concerns addressed by the draft guidelines, i.e. reducing information asymmetry and market fairness. In addition to this we share comments around a third concern that requires additional scrutiny, i.e. data privacy and security.

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Comments to the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024

by Abhineet Nayyar, Isha Suri, and Pallavi Bedi (in alphabetical order)

This submission is a response by researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society India (CIS) to the draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024, published by the Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL), Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA), (hereafter “draft DCB” or “draft Bill”).

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Consultation on Gendered Information Disorder in India

by Amrita Sengupta and Yesha Tshering Paul

On 14th and 15th March 2024, Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) collaborated with Point of View (POV) to organise a consultation in Mumbai to explore the phenomenon of gendered information disorder in India, spanning various aspects from healthcare and sexuality to financial literacy, and the role of digital mediums, social media platforms and AI in exacerbating these issues.

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Reconfiguring Data Governance: Insights from India and the EU

by Swati Punia, Srishti Joshi, Siddharth Peter De Souza, Linnet Taylor, Jhalak M. Kakkar, Isha Suri, Arindrajit Basu, and Anushka Mittal

This policy paper is the result of a workshop organised jointly by the Tilburg Institute of Law, Technology and Society, Netherlands, the Centre for Communication Governance at the National Law University Delhi, India and the Centre for Internet & Society, India in January, 2023. The workshop brought together a number of academics, researchers, and industry representatives in Delhi to discuss a range of issues at the core of data governance theory and practice.

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Information Disorders and their Regulation

by Torsha Sarkar, Shruti Trikanad, and Anoushka Soni

The Indian media and digital sphere, perhaps a crude reflection of the socio-economic realities of the Indian political landscape, presents a unique and challenging setting for studying information disorders.

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Digital Delivery and Data System for Farmer Income Support

by Sameet Panda

This report, jointly published by the Centre for Internet & Society and Privacy International, highlights the digital systems deployed by the government to augment farmer income. It analyses the PM-Kisan and Kalia schemes in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh.

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Deceptive Design in Voice Interfaces: Impact on Inclusivity, Accessibility, and Privacy

by Saumyaa Naidu and Shweta Mohandas

This article was commissioned by the Pranava Institute, as part of their project titled Design Beyond Deception, supported by the University of Notre Dame - IBM's Tech Ethics Lab.” The article examines the design of voice interfaces (VI) to anticipate potential deceptive design patterns in VIs. It also presents design and regulatory recommendations to mitigate these practices.

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Health Data Management Policies - Differences Between the EU and India

by Shweta Mohandas

Through this issue brief we would like to highlight the differences in approaches to health data management taken by the EU and India, and look at possible recommendations for India, in creating a privacy preserving health data management policy.

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