We are anonymous, we are legion

India: Privacy Bill will likely reflect EU Directive

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:45:37Z

The Indian Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) called for comments - on 25 February 2014 - on a draft Privacy Protection Bill ('the Bill'). The draft Bill comes after a series of roundtable discussions in 2013. The last CIS roundtable on the Bill, on 19 October 2013, included Jacob Kohnstamm, Chairman of the EU Article 29 Working Party and the Dutch data protection authority, and Christopher Graham, the UK Information Commissioner.

The article was published in DataGuidance on March 3, 2014.

"In its eventual form, I expect [the Bill] will be modelled to a great extent on the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC)," Rodney Ryder, Partner at Scriboard, told DataGuidance. "The European Directive is an important model as India moves forward." Data protection in India is currently regulated by the Information Technology Act 2011, however, if enacted, the Bill would introduce the country's first comprehensive privacy regime. In 2013, the European Commission assessed India's data protection regime and decided not to award adequacy recognition at that time.

"If the Bill is introduced in the Winter Session, […] it is likely to […] come into effect either at the end of the year or early in the next year"

The draft Bill regulates collection, storage and processing of personal data, with both monetary and penal penalties yet to be determined for anyone who 'collects, receives, stores, processes or otherwise handles any personal data [except in conformity with the provisions of the Act].' It also establishes an Indian Data Protection Authority (DPA), with the power to investigate data processing and to 'give such directions or pass such orders as are necessary.'

"[Moving forward,] we expect more clarity on the role and functioning of the DPA," Ryder stated. "In the past, the Government of India has not been clear on the role of the DPA. Will this 'authority' have the independent powers and stature of the European Privacy Commissioners? [Additionally,] the complaint mechanism under the Bill requires greater clarity, precision and structure."

Divya Sharma, Legal Director at Bird and Bird LLP, commented, "Considering that India has parliamentary elections scheduled to take place in April 2014, this bill is unlikely to progress further until a new Government takes office in May 2014. […] Any legislation of this nature is unlikely to progress during this Government's tenure."

"If the Bill is introduced in the Winter Session, after due consideration, it is likely to be passed by the end of the Year and come into effect either at the end of the year or early in the next year," said Ryder.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/data-guidance-march-3-2014-india-privacy-bill-will-likely-reflect-eu-directive

India: obscene pics of gods require massive human censorship of Google, Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-01-17T09:46:25Z

It's hardly the sort of Internet policy statement one hopes to hear from judges in major democracies. "Like China, we can block all such websites [who don't comply]," Justice Suresh Cait told Facebook and Google lawyers in India yesterday. "But let us not go to that situation."

No, let's not. But it's what the government wants if Internet companies won't start screening and censoring all user-generated material on social network and user-generated content sites. And they'd better do their screening by hand, not with machines.

The New York Times reported last December that India's Telecommunications and Human Resources Development Minister, Kapil Sibal, has been battling hard with Internet companies on pre-emptive screening and censorship.

About six weeks ago, Mr. Sibal called legal representatives from the top Internet service providers and Facebook into his New Delhi office, said one of the executives who was briefed on the meeting.

At the meeting, Mr. Sibal showed attendees a Facebook page that maligned the Congress Party’s president, Sonia Gandhi. “This is unacceptable,” he told attendees, the executive said, and he asked them to find a way to monitor what is posted on their sites.

In the second meeting with the same executives in late November, Mr. Sibal told them that he expected them to use human beings to screen content, not technology, the executive said.

The Internet companies insist that they can't possibly pre-screen everything that goes up. If something truly is illegal under local laws, they are generally willing to take it down when a court rules.

The main concern is obscenity (though criticism of government officials appears to touch a sore spot, too); in the current case against Facebook, Google, and others, the obscenity involves pictures of gods, goddesses, and Mohammed.

"At present it's obscene images of Gods and Goddesses, tomorrow it can be an image of someone in your family posted online. There has to be some control," Justice Cait said at yesterday's hearing. He allowed the case against the Internet companies to proceed.

Who's pressing for the court case? A journalist. NDTV has a new interview with him, in which the man presses for quick action. (Note: the actual interview portion is not in English.)

Can we censor dissent while we're at it?

Between January and June 2011, India requested that Google remove 358 bits of content by filing 68 different complaints. One was from Google Maps (for "national security"); almost every other was from YouTube, social network Orkut, and Google's Blogger platform. Almost none came with a court order.

"We received requests from state and local law enforcement agencies to remove YouTube videos that displayed protests against social leaders or used offensive language in reference to religious leaders," Google explained.

"We declined the majority of these requests and only locally restricted videos that appeared to violate local laws prohibiting speech that could incite enmity between communities. In addition, we received a request from a local law enforcement agency to remove 236 communities and profiles from Orkut that were critical of a local politician. We did not comply with this request."

This is hardly an inspiring track record. While in public the companies are criticized for obscenity, Google's most recent records show only 3 requests to remove pornographic material. Government criticism and defamation were actually the two largest categories of requested material.

As the Financial Times "beyondbrics" blog notes, the Internet companies are coming under increasing attack for content they host, despite the vagueness of the demands for censorship. For instance, "Last month, a lower court had ordered the sites to remove all 'anti-social' or 'anti-religious' content by February 6. As Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, told beyondbrics last month, it’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews."

Photograph by Diganta Talukdar

The blog post by Nate Anderson was published in ars technica on 14 January 2012

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/obsecene-pics-of-gods-require-massive-human-censorship

India’s vanishing fingerprints put UID in question

praskrishna — 2011-10-26T10:05:13Z

A curious situation has come to light at the UID (unique identity) enrolment centres. Call it the phenomenon of vanishing fingerprints. You see, our unique fingerprints don’t necessarily last a lifetime and they can be damaged or destroyed and, in some cases, even non-existent. And that is not the best scenario for the first-of-its-kind project that endeavours to create a unique identity for India’s billion-plus population based on fingerprints and iris scans (or biometric data).

To find out more, Firstpost visited five UID centres in the North West district, which incidentally has the highest enrolments (619,571 and counting) among Delhi’s nine districts since the show hit the road in February 2011, and one centre in North Delhi.

The officials at the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) will tell you that there is no overemphasising the importance of the quality of biometric data to the success of the super ambitious UID, now known as Aadhar project. If the quality of a person’s biometric data is poor, it automatically compromises the authentication of that data by him when he wants to access a service based on his UID.

So what happens when the data – fingerprints, for instance – are inherently unreliable on account of various biological and socio-economic reasons, some of which are especially relevant to the Indian context.

The UIDAI’s Committee on Biometrics in a December 2009 was rather forthright about its reservations on the fingerprint reliability. Titled Biometrics Design Standards For UID Applications (page 4, para 4), it stated, "….two factors however, raise uncertainty about the accuracy that can be achieved through fingerprints. First, retaining efficacy while scaling the database size from fifty million to a billion has not been adequately analysed. Second, fingerprint quality, the most important variable for determining de-duplication accuracy, has not been studied in depth in the Indian context." (Emphasis added).

The findings on the ground were revelatory. Operators and technical experts at the UID enrolment centres confirmed to Firstpost that they routinely came across cases where fingerprints had been damaged/destroyed/underdeveloped. And such cases, they said, were more common among senior citizens, those involved in manual labour (who handle rough objects, for instance) and children (mostly below 10 years of age).

Here is an example that Firstpost observed.

Batuli, 72, arrived at around noon at the Basti Vikas Kendra, now also a UID centre, in Mangol Puri to get herself a ‘smart card’ everyone has been talking about. (The 'Aadhar' brand name hasn’t caught on in these parts of Delhi, with everyone insisting on calling it the 'smart card'.)

The helpful operator with the fancy gadgets helps Batuli to her seat. After her photo is taken, Batuli is asked to place four fingers — one hand at a time — on a green-lit device. Right hand, then left hand.

She is, however, asked to repeat the exercise a second time for the left hand. The operator explains. "In some case, we have to scan the fingerprints and Iris multiple times. If it doesn’t pass the required quality percentage of 70 per cent (the quality is indicated in percentage terms on the computer screen that is connected to the fingerprint machine, see pic), we repeat the exercise up to four times."

Batuli’s hands are then wiped using a cloth and placed back on the device. The exercise is repeated a fourth and final time. But still the same result. 'Fail', declares the reading on the operator’s computer.

An operator at the next station, says, "In the case of senior citizens, Iris scans also sometime fail. It registers weakly when the retina is damaged."

(Enrolment centres are run by private companies on contracts given by registrars chosen by the UIDAI. Strategic Outsourcing is one such company and it runs many of centres in the North West and South West districts of Delhi.)

The project coordinator of the UID enrolment centre working out of the Destitute Welfare Trust, an NGO in Sultanpuri, too, confirmed that he was aware of the problem of damaged fingerprints and the challenge it posed in getting good quality fingerprint data.

"The hands of children are very soft and in some cases fingerprints are not yet fully developed. Also, children tend to have sweaty hands and this can interfere with the quality of fingerprints. Extremely dry hands also pose problems. We have to often, wipe the hands or provide lotion to improve the quality of fingerprints," said a technical expert working with Strategic Outsourcing.

While the number of attempts, as prescribed by the UIDAI, to get a stronger finger print when the result reads 'fail' is four, operators report that sometimes attempts go up to 10 to 15. (The machine picks up the strongest impression of the attempts made). They say they didn’t anticipate such a problem and it was only when they started enrolments in January that they were confronted with such a scenario. “Now, of course, everybody knows about it."

'Everybody' implies those who are directly involved in collecting biometric data. An operator from another private company Smartchip working in a JJ (slum) colony in the North Delhi district of Model town, revealed similar problems on being probed. "A fingerprint strength of 70 percent or more is pass. About 10 per cent of the cases we get every day register the 'fail' reading. What can we do? In the case of stone cutters, for instance, the fingers are completely smooth, the fingerprints are completely wiped out."

So what are the implications of poor quality fingerprints for the UID project? The UIDAI admitted that it could provide challenges to authentication.

In an email response to Firstpost, Sujata Chaturvedi, UIDAI’s Deputy Director General for the Delhi region said, "It could provide some challenges in de-duplication although that has been mitigated to a large extent by the decision of the UIDAI to go in for iris an additional de-duplication factor… Also to be noted is the fact that normally not all fingers are equally de-graded. So UIDAI is evolving a protocol to inform the residents about their good quality fingerprints as part of the Aadhaar letter so that they are aware of the finger to use for authentication."

But not everyone is convinced. Sunil Abraham is the executive director of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), which has written seven open letters to the Standing Committee on the Finance Branch (before which is the National Identification Authority of India Bill, 2010) asking the committee to consider their research on the UID project and change aspects of the Bill and the project.

The seventh letter sent last week, says Abraham, provides statistical analysis that demonstrates how the UID will never be able to create a unique database.

"In CIS’s seventh open letter to the finance committee, statistical analysis reveals that UIDAI tender specification is 1,000 times less accurate than it should be to have a reasonable chance of building a truly unique database. This analysis depends on high quality biometrics. With poor biometric quality the problem of de-duplication is compounded."

When UIDAI was asked what the percentage of the population enrolled (all India and Delhi) had recorded below-standard fingerprint quality, no specific data was forthcoming.

Chaturvedi wrote, "Currently the population with very poor quality fingerprints is a very small percentage. It must also be remembered that this population is scattered all over the country."

In India, even a small percentage translates to millions of people. "Small percentage could mean absolutely anything. Why can’t they be more specific? One percent in the Indian context is 12 million people," said Abraham.

On how the UIDAI was dealing with challenge of poor fingerprint quality, Chaturvedi said, "Even amongst the populace that has damaged/destroyed/underdeveloped fingerprints, chances are very high that they would have at least one good fingerprint that could be used for authentication. Second, UIDAI is also starting to actively develop iris authentication ecosystem. Fingerprint authentication and iris authentication could supplement each other to ensure a universal coverage."

She added that Aadhaar authentication will supplement and work in conjunction with existing authentication systems to strengthen the overall authentication rather than replace completely the existing authentication systems.

That begs the question, as Abraham puts it, "If the UIDAI is not going to replace existing forms of authentication it is not clear why the government is spending all this money on unproven biometric technology."

Chaturvedi, however, maintained that the initial PoC (proof of concept) study that was taken up in Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Jharkhand collected about 60,000 enrolments indicated that the biometric accuracy levels necessary for de-duplication of all residents of India are achievable.

"The PoC results also indicated the time needed for capture of biometrics in typical rural conditions is small enough to support large scale enrolment. Over and above the initial PoC, the UIDAI has currently completed over 5 crore enrolments for which Aadhaars have been generated. This experience reinforces the initial PoC results that the de-duplication accuracy is sufficient and sustainable to enrol the rest of the population."

The original article is written by Pallavi Polanki. It was published in Firstpost on October 24, 2011 and can be read here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/vanishing-fingerprints-put-uid-in-question

India’s Supreme Court strikes down law that led to Facebook arrests

praskrishna — 2015-03-27T00:29:08Z

India’s Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a provision of a law that made it illegal to spread “offensive messages” on electronic devices and resulted in arrests over posts on Facebook and other social media.

The article by Annie Gowen was published in Washington Post on March 24, 2015. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

In a decision hailed as a victory for free speech, Judge Rohinton Fali Nariman ruled that Section 66A of the Information Technology Act was unconstitutional, writing that the vaguely worded legislation had wrongly swept up innocent people and had a “chilling” effect on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.

“Section 66A is cast so widely that virtually any opinion on any subject would be covered by it,” the judge wrote. “If it is to withstand the test of constitutionality, the chilling effect on free speech would be total.”

India passed the Information Technology Act in 2000, and an amendment that went into effect in 2009 gave authorities broad powers to arrest those who post content deemed “grossly offensive” or false. The offense was punishable by up to three years in jail and a fine.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said that the provision was originally intended to protect citizens from electronic spam but that it was used much more broadly.

“Politicians who didn’t like what people were saying about them used it to crack down on online criticism,” he said.

The section has resulted in more than 20 high-profile arrests, including that of a professor who posted an unflattering cartoon of a state political leader and an artist who drew cartoons lampooning the government and Parliament.

The most well-known was the case of two young women arrested in the western town of Palghar after one of them posted a comment on Facebook that said Mumbai should not have been shut down for the funeral of a famous conservative leader. A friend who merely “liked” the post also was arrested. After much outcry, the two were released on bail and the charges eventually dropped.

The case of the “Palghar Girls” inspired a young law student, Shreya Singhal, to take on the law. Singhal became the chief petitioner for the case, joined by other free speech advocates and an Indian information technology firm.

[When — and where — posting the wrong thing to Facebook can get you arrested]

“It’s a big victory,” Singhal said after the ruling. “The Internet is so far-reaching and so many people use it now, it’s very important for us to protect this right.”

In addition, Singhal and other petitioners had argued that a section of the Information Technology Act that allowed the government to block Web sites containing questionable material also was unconstitutional. The court disagreed, however, saying there was a sufficient review process in place to avoid misuse.

Free speech is enshrined in the Indian constitution but has its limits. Books and movies are often banned or censored out of consideration for the sentiments of religious and minority groups.

Last year, a conservative Hindu group persuaded Penguin India to withdraw a book on Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, from the Indian market. And, more recently, the government halted the planned television debut of a documentary on a 2012 gang rape called “India’s Daughter.”

[India blocks film about 2012 New Delhi rape case]

The government, whose attorney had argued in court that the legislature was in the best position to understand the needs of the people, also welcomed the decision.

“The government is committed to free speech. India is a democratic country, and free flow of ideas should be respected. We do not seek to curtail any rights,” said Ravi Shankar Prasad, the minister of communications and information technology. He cautioned, however, that social media users and platforms should show self-restraint.

In recent years, other nations also have sharply increased monitoring of and crackdowns on Web posts perceived as insulting.

Across the Persian Gulf Arab states, dozens of activists have been arrested for social media posts considered insulting to the countries’ rulers or damaging to the national image. In January 2014, an American national was allowed to leave the United Arab Emirates after serving more than eight months in prison for posting a YouTube video spoofing the UAE’s youth culture.

Brian Murphy in Washington contributed to this report. Picture: (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/washington-post-annie-gowen-march-24-2015-indias-sc-strikes-down-law-that-led-to-fb-arrests

India’s Supreme Court strikes down law that led to arrests over Facebook posts

praskrishna — 2015-03-26T01:49:54Z

Judge rules that section of the information technology law was unconstitutional, had wrongly swept up innocent people and had a ‘chilling’ effect on free speech.

The article by Annie Gowen was published in 'The Star.com' on March 25, 2015. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The Supreme Court in India struck down a section of its country’s information technology act Tuesday that had made it illegal to spread “offensive messages” on electronic devices and resulted in arrests over posts on Facebook and other social media.

Supreme Court Judge Rohinton Fali Nariman wrote in the ruling that the section of the law, known as 66A, was unconstitutional, saying the vaguely worded legislation had wrongly swept up innocent people and had a “chilling” effect on free speech in the world’s most populous democracy.

India had first passed its Information Technology Act in 2000, but stricter provisions were added in 2008 and ratified in 2009 that gave police sweeping authority to arrest citizens for their personal posts on social media, a crime punishable for up to three years in jail and a fine.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, said the section was originally intended to protect citizens from electronic spam, but it did not turn out that way.

“Politicians who didn’t like what people were saying about them used it to crack down on online criticism,” he said.

In the end, there were more than 20 high-profile arrests, including a professor who posted an unflattering cartoon of a state political leader and another artist who drew a set of cartoons lampooning the government and Parliament.

The most well-known was the case of two young women arrested in the western town of Palghar after one of them posted a comment on Facebook that argued the city of Mumbai should not have been shut down for the funeral of a famous conservative leader. A friend, who merely “liked” the post, was also arrested. After much outcry, the two were released on bail and the charges eventually dropped.

The case of the “Palghar Girls” inspired a young law student, Shreya Singhal, to take on the government’s law. Singhal became the chief petitioner for the case, along with other free speech advocates and an Indian information technology firm.

“It’s a big victory,” Singhal said after the ruling. “The Internet is so far-reaching and so many people use it now, it’s very important for us to protect this right.”

Singhal and other petitioners had also argued that another section of India’s technology act that allowed the government to block websites containing questionable material were also unconstitutional, but the court disagreed, saying there was a sufficient review process in place to avoid misuse.

Free speech in India is enshrined in the country’s constitution but has its limits. Books and movies are often banned or censored out of consideration for religious and minority groups.

In 2014, a conservative Hindu group persuaded Penguin India to withdraw a book about Hinduism by Wendy Doniger, a professor of religion at the University of Chicago, from the Indian market. And more recently, the government of India blocked a planned television debut of a documentary film on a 2012 gang rape case, India’s Daughter.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-star-march-25-2015-annie-gowen-indias-supreme-court-strikes-down-law-that-led-to-arrests-over-facebook-posts

India’s Supreme Court hears challenge to biometric authentication system

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T06:44:02Z

Two lawsuits being heard this week before India’s Supreme Court question a requirement imposed by the government that individuals should quote a biometrics-based authentication number when filing their tax returns.

The post by John Riberio, IDG News Service was mirrored by IT World on May 3, 2017.

Civil rights groups have opposed the Aadhaar biometric system, which is based on centralized records of all ten fingerprints and iris scans, as their extensive use allegedly encroach on the privacy rights of Indians. “Aadhaar is surveillance technology masquerading as secure authentication technology,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bangalore-based research organization, the Centre for Internet and Society.

The Indian government has in the meantime extended the use of Aadhaar, originally meant to identify beneficiaries of state schemes for the poor, to other areas such as filing of taxes, distribution of meals to school children and payment systems.

Hearings on the writ petitions, challenging the amendment to the Income Tax Act, are going on in Delhi before a Supreme Court bench consisting of Justices A.K. Sikri and Ashok Bhushan.

Tax payers are required to have the Aadhaar number in addition to their permanent account number (PAN), which they have previously used to file their tax returns. Their failure to produce the Aadhaar number would lead to invalidation of the PAN number, affecting people who are already required to quote this number for other transactions such as buying cars or opening bank accounts.

The stakes in this dispute are high. The petitioners have argued for Aadhaar being voluntary and question the manner in which the new amendment to the tax law has been introduced. The government has said both in court and in other public forums that it needs a reliable and mandatory biometric system to get around the issue of fake PAN numbers.

The lawyer for one of the plaintiffs, Shyam Divan, has argued for the individual’s absolute ownership of her body, citing Article 21 of the Indian Constitution, which protects a person from being “deprived of his life or personal liberty except according to procedure established by law.” The government has countered by saying that citizens do not have absolute rights over their bodies, citing the law against an individual committing suicide as an example.

The Supreme Court in another lawsuit looking into privacy issues and the constitutionality of the Aadhaar scheme had ruled in an interim order in 2015 that the biometric program had to be voluntary and could not be used to deprive the poor of benefits.

"The production of an Aadhaar card will not be condition for obtaining any benefits otherwise due to a citizen," the top court ruled.

The government holds that the Aadhaar Act, passed in Parliament last year, provides the legal backing for making the biometric identification compulsory.

The current lawsuits against Aadhaar have not been argued on grounds of privacy, reportedly because the court would not allow this line of argument, which is already being heard in the other case. The Supreme Court has made current petitioners “fight this battle with one arm tied behind their backs!,” wrote lawyer Gautam Bhatia in a blog post Wednesday.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/idg-news-service-john-riberio-may-3-2017-indias-supreme-court-hears-challenge-to-biometric-authentication-system

India’s ruling party takes online abuse to a professional level

praskrishna — 2016-12-31T02:19:14Z

Indian prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) employs an army of trolls to harass and intimidate critics through social media, a new book claims.

The article by Samanth Subramanian was published in the National on December 31, 2016. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

I Am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army, by the journalist Swati Chaturvedi, alleges that the party’s social media warriors carry out organised harassment, threatening critics of the BJP with assault, sexual violence and even murder.

Although other parties also have social media units, the BJP’s is particularly well organised and vociferous, Chaturvedi wrote.

The BJP social media cell is active on Twitter and Facebook, as well as in the comments sections of articles on news websites, Chaturvedi found. Some of the abusive PRO-BJP Twitter handles are still followed by Mr Modi’s official Twitter account.

I Am a Troll is based largely upon the account of Sadhavi Khosla, now an activist but formerly a volunteer for two years in the BJP’s social media cell, which went into top gear during the parliamentary elections in 2014 when Mr Modi beat the incumbent Congress party led by Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul.

Mr Modi campaigned on a platform of fervent nationalism, drawing upon the BJP’s Hindu chauvinist credentials to attract votes. His party’s social media cell responded accordingly.

"It was a never-ending drip feed of hate and bigotry against the minorities, the Gandhi family, journalists on the hit list, liberals, anyone perceived as anti-Modi," Ms Khosla told Chaturvedi.

The BJP has responded to the claims made in the book by accusing Ms Khosla of political bias, saying she "supports the Congress [and] has all reasons to publish unsubstantiated claims". -In fact, she has never revealed her own political leanings, or even whether she has any.

Arvind Gupta, the head of the BJP’s information technology cell, denies the party encouraged trolling or that Ms Khosla had been a member of any BJP unit.

By way of evidence, Ms Khosla shared with Chaturvedi screenshots of instructions that were purportedly sent by Mr Gupta to the operators of the social media cell. "If there was even an unfavourable mention of [Modi] anywhere, Gupta’s digital tracking tools would pick it up and the pack of hyena-like trolls would descend," Ms Khosla said.

One specific campaign cited in I Am a Troll took place in November last year, after the actor Aamir Khan, speaking as the chief guest at a journalism awards ceremony, remarked upon the growing intolerance in India. "There is a growing sense of disquiet and despondency," he said.

Ms Khosla said the BJP’s social media cell was instructed to launch an all-out attack on Khan. She and her colleagues were also asked to spread a petition calling upon SnapDeal, a shopping website, to drop Khan as its brand ambassador.

"I realised that my hero had become a ‘Muslim’," Ms Khosla said in the book. "For me he had just been an Indian actor. I felt like my country was changing."

SnapDeal cut its ties with Khan in February. Ms Khosla, who said she had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the social media cell’s tactics, quit not long after.

"I simply could not follow directions anymore when I saw rape threats made against female journalists," she said. "Every day some new person was a target and they would attack like a swarm of bees with vile sexual innuendoes, slander, rape and death threats."

Chaturvedi’s book calls for social media companies and police agencies to take such threats more seriously.

"In the United States, which is a beacon for free speech laws, thousands are arrested each year — and the courts uphold these allegations as ‘actionable’ — based on complaints from people who have received violent threats on social media," she wrote.

"Hate speech, targeted harassment, threats of rape with graphic details of assault, incitement to violence — all this is ‘actionable’ too but our police does not act."

Pranesh Prakash, the policy director at the Centre for internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation, noted that although there are no Indian laws specifically against abusive online behaviour, the general laws that deal with verbal assault cover online cases as well.

"But I’m not sure how much these cases can be taken forward, given jurisdictional problems," Mr Prakash told The National.

When a person complains to police about online abuse, "the first step would be to establish against whom the case is being made, and doing that is difficult", he said.

Since most social media companies are based in the US, police agencies would have to approach India’s foreign ministry which could then invoke a bilateral treaty to gain this information.

"This can take several months if not longer," Mr Prakash said. "And most police stations are not equipped to handle such treaty-based cases."

"Even if the police takes such complaints seriously — and it’s not always clear that they do — there’s no easy way to proceed."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-national-december-31-2016-samanth-subramanian-indias-ruling-party-takes-online-abuse-to-a-professional-level

India’s Role in Global Cyber Policy Formulation

basu — 2019-11-13T14:13:33Z

The past year has seen vigorous activity on the domestic cyber policy front in India. On key issues—including intermediary liability, data localization and e-commerce—the government has rolled out a patchwork of regulatory policies, resulting in battle lines being drawn by governments, industry and civil society actors both in India and across the globe.

The article by Arindrajit Basu was published in Lawfare on November 7, 2019. The article was reviewed and edited by Elonnai Hickok and Justin Sherman.

The onslaught of recent developments demonstrates how India can shape cyber policy debates. Among emerging economies, India is uniquely positioned to exercise leverage over multinational tech companies due to its sheer population size, combined with a rapid surge in users coming online and the country’s large gross domestic product. India occupies a key seat at the data governance table alongside other players like the EU, China, Russia and the United States — a position the country should use to promote its interests and those of other similarly placed emerging economies.

For many years, the Indian population has served as an economic resource for foreign, largely U.S.-based tech giants. Now, however, India is moving toward a regulatory strategy that reduces the autonomy of these companies in order to pivot away from a system that recently has been termed “data colonialism”—in which Western technologies use data-driven revenue bolstered by information extracted from consumers in the Global South to consolidate their global market power. The policy thinking underpinning India’s new grand vision still has some gaps, however.

Data Localization

Starting with a circular from the Reserve Bank of India in April 2018, the Indian government has introduced a range of policy instruments mandating “data localization”—that is, requiring that certain kinds of data must be stored in servers located physically within India. A snapshot of these policies is summarized in the table below.

(Source here. Design credit: Saumyaa Naidu)

While there are a number of reasons for this maneuver, two in particular are in line with India’s broader vision of data sovereignty—broadly defined as the sovereign right of nations to govern data within their territory and/or jurisdiction in order to support their national interest for the welfare of their citizens. First, there is an incentive to keep data within India’s jurisdiction because of the cumbersome process through which Indian law enforcement agencies must go during criminal investigations in order to access data stored in the U.S. Second, data localization undercuts the extractive economic models used by U.S. companies operating in India by which the data generated by Indian citizens is collected in India, stored in data centers located largely in the U.S., and processed and analyzed to derive commercially valuable insights.

Both foreign players and smaller Indian private-sector actors were against this move. A study on the issue that I co-authored earlier this year with Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Chawla found that one of the reasons for this resistance involved the high costs of setting up the data centers that are needed to comply with the requirement. President Trump echoed this sentiment when he explicitly opposed data localization during a meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G-20 in June 2019.

At the same time, large Indian players such as Reliance and Paytm and Chinese companies like AliBaba and Xilink were in favor of localization—possibly because these companies could absorb the costs of setting up storage facilities while benefiting from the fixed costs imposed on foreign competition. In fact, some companies, such as AliBaba, have already set up storage facilities in India.

As my co-authors and I noted, data localization comes with various risks, both diplomatically and politically. So far, the issue has caused friction in U.S.-India trade relations. For example, before Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's trip to New Delhi in June, the Trump administration reportedly contemplated limiting H-1B visas for any country that implements a localization requirement. Further, on his trips to New Delhi, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has regularly argued that data localization restrictions are a barrier to U.S. companies and stressed the need to eliminate such barriers. Further, data localization poses several technical challenges as well as security risks. Mirroring data across multiple locations, as India’s Draft Personal Data Protection Bill mandates, increases the number of physical data centers that need to be protected and thereby the number of vulnerable points that malicious actors can attack.

Recently, the Indian media have reported disagreements between policymakers over data localization, along with speculation that the data storage requirement in the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill could be limited only to critical data—a term not defined in the bill itself—or be left to sectoral regulators, officials from individual government departments.

Our paper recommended a dual approach. In our view, data localization policy should include mandatory localization for critical sectors such as defense or payments data, while also adopting “conditional” localization for all other data. Under conditional localization, data should only be transferred to countries that (a) agree to share the personal data of Indian citizens with law enforcement authorities based on Indian criminal procedure laws (examples of such a mechanism may be an executive data-sharing agreement under the CLOUD Act) and (b) have equivalent privacy and security safeguards. This approach would be in line with India’s overarching vision of data sovereignty and the goal of standing up to the hegemony of big tech and of U.S. internet regulations, while avoiding undue collateral damage to India’s global alliances.

Intermediary Liability

In line with the goal of ensuring that big tech is answerable to the rule of law, the Indian government has also sought to regulate the adverse social impacts of some speech hosted by platforms. Rule 3(9) of the Draft of the Information Technology Intermediaries Guidelines (Amendment) Rules, 2018, released by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in December 2019, takes up the interventionist mission of laws like the NetzDg in Germany. The regulation would mandate that platforms use “automated tools or appropriate mechanisms, with appropriate controls, for proactively identifying and removing or disabling public access to unlawful information or content.” These regulations have prompted concerns from both the private sector and civil society groups that claim the proposal fails to address constitutional concerns about algorithmic discrimination, excessive censorship and inappropriate delegation of legislative powers under Indian law. Further, some observers object that the guidelines adopt a “one-size-fits-all” approach to classifying intermediaries that does not differentiate between platforms that thrive on end-to-end encryption like WhatsApp and public platforms like Facebook.

In many ways, these guidelines—likely to be notified (as an amendment to the Information Technology Act) as early as January 2020—put the cart before the horse. Before devising regulatory models appropriate for India’s geographic scale and population, it is first necessary to conduct empirical research about the vectors through which misinformation spreads in India and how misinformation impacts different social, economic and linguistic communities, along with pilot programs for potential solutions to the misinformation problem. And it is imperative that these measures be brought in line with constitutional requirements.

Community Data and “Data as a Public Good”

Another important question involves the precise meaning of “data” itself—an issue on which various policy documents have failed to deliver a consistent stance.

The first conceptualization of “community data” appears in both the Srikrishna Committee Report that accompanied the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill in 2018 and the draft e-commerce policy. However, neither policy provides clarity on the concept of data.

When defining community data, the Srikrishna Report endorses a collective protection of privacy as protecting an identifiable community that has contributed to community data. According to the Srikrishna Report, receiving collective protection requires the fulfillment of three key aspects. First, the data belong to an identifiable community. Second, the individuals in the community consent to being a part of the community. And third, the community as a whole consents to its data being treated as community data.

The draft e-commerce policy reconceptualizes the notion of community data as “societal commons” or a “national resource,” where the undefined ‘community” has rights to access data but the government has overriding control to utilize the data for welfare purposes. Unlike the Srikrishna Report, the draft e-commerce policy does not outline the key aspects of community data. This approach fails to demarcate a clear line between personal and nonpersonal data or to specify any practical guidelines or restrictions on how the government can use community data. For this reason, implementation of this policy could pose a threat to the right to privacy that the Indian Supreme Court recognized as a fundamental right in 2017.

The second idea is that of “data as a public good.” This is described in Chapter 4 of the 2019 Economic Survey Report—a document published by the Ministry of Finance along with the Annual Financial Budget. The report explicitly states that any data governance framework needs to be deferential to privacy norms and the soon-to-be-enacted privacy law. The report further states that “personal data” of an individual in the custody of a government is a “public good” once the datasets are anonymized.

However, the report’s recommendation of setting up a government database that links several individual databases together leads to the “triangulation” problem, in which individuals can be identified by matching different datasets together. The report further suggests that the same data can be sold to private firms (though it is unclear whether this includes foreign or domestic firms). This directly contradicts the characterization of a “public good”—which, by definition, must be n onexcludable and nonrivalrous—and is also at odds with the government’s vision of reining in big tech. The government has set up an expert committee to look into the scope of nonpersonal data, and the results of the committee’s deliberations are likely to influence the shape that India’s data governance framework takes across multiple policy instruments.

There is obviously a need to reassess and reevaluate the range of governance efforts and gambits that have emerged in the past year. With domestic cyber policy formulation pivots reaching a crescendo, we must consider how domestic cyber policy efforts can influence India’s approach to global debates in this space.

India’s Contribution to Global Cyber Policy Debates

As the largest democracy in the world, India is undoubtedly a key “digital decider” in shaping the future of the internet. Multilateral cyber policy formulation efforts remain polarized. The U.S. and its European allies continue to advocate for a free, rules-based conception of cyberspace with limited governmental interference. China and Russia, along with their Shanghai Cooperation Organisation allies, are pushing for a tightly regulated internet in which each state has the right to manage and define its “network frontiers” through domestic regulation free from external interference. To some degree, India is already influencing debate over the internet through its various domestic cyber policy movements. However, its participation in international debates has been lacking the vigor or coherence needed to clearly articulate India’s national interests and take up a global leadership role.

In shaping its contributions to global cyber policy formulation, India should focus its efforts on three key places: (a) internet governance forums that deliberate the governance of the technical architecture of the internet such as domain names, (b) cyber norms formulation processes that seek to establish norms to foster responsible behavior in cyberspace by states and nonstate actors in cyberspace, and (3) global debates on trade and cross-border data flows that seek to conceptualize the future of global digital trade relationships. As I discuss below, there are key divisions in Indian policy in each of these forums. To realize its grand vision in the digital sphere, India needs to do much more to make its presence felt.

Internet Governance Forums

India’s stance on a variety of issues at internet governance forums has been inconsistent, switching repeatedly between multilateral and multistakeholder visions for internet governance. A core reason for this uncertainty is the participation of multiple Indian government ministries, which often disagree with each other. At global internet governance forums, India has been represented either by the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (now renamed to Ministry of Electronics and Information Technoloft or the Department of Telecommunications (under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology) or by the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

As my colleagues have documented in a detailed paper, India has been vocal in global internet governance debates at forums including the International Telecommunications Union, the Internet Governance Forum and the U.N. General Assembly. However, the Indian stance on multistakeholderism has been complex, with the MEA advocating for a multilateral stance while the other departments switched between multistakeholderism and “nuanced multilateralism”—which calls for multistakeholder participation in policy formulation but multilateral implementation. The paper also argues that there has been a decline recently in the vigor of Indian participation at forums such as the 2018 meeting of the Working Group on Enhanced Co-operation (WGEC 2.0), due to key personnel changes. For example, B.N. Reddy, who was a skilled and experienced negotiator for the MEA in previous forums, was transferred to another position before WGEC 2.0, and the delegation that attended the meeting did not make its presence felt as strongly or skillfully.

Cyber Norms for Responsible State Behavior in Cyberspace

With the exception of two broad and unoriginal statements at the 70th and 71st sessions of the U.N. General Assembly, India has yet to make public its position on the multilateral debate on the proliferation of norms for responsible state behavior in cyberspace. During the substantive session of the Open-Ended Working Group held in September, India largely reaffirmed points made by other states, rather than carving out a new or original approach. The silence and ambiguity is surprising, as India has been represented on four of the five Groups of Governmental Experts (GGEs) set up thus far and has also been inducted into the 2019-2021 GGE that is set to revamp the global cyber norms process. (Due to the GGE’s rotational membership policy, India was not a member of the fourth GGE that submitted its report in 2015.)

However, before becoming an evangelist of any particular norms, India has some homework to do domestically. It has yet to advance a clear, coherent and detailed public stance outlining its views on the application of international law to cyberspace. This public stance is necessary for two reasons. First, a well-reasoned statement that explains India’s stance on core security issues—such as the applicability of self-defense, countermeasures and international humanitarian law—would show India’s appetite for offensive and defensive strategies for external adversaries and allies alike. This would serve as the edifice of a potentially credible cyber deterrence strategy. Second, developing a public stance would help India to take advantage of the economic, demographic and political leverage that it holds and to assume a leadership role in discussions. The U.K., France, Germany, Estonia, Cuba (backed by China and Russia) and the U.S. have all made their positions publicly known with varying degrees of detail.

Data Transfers

Unlike in other forums, Indian policy has been clearer in the cross-border data transfer debate. This is a foreign policy extension of India’s emphasis on localization and data sovereignty in domestic policy instruments. At the G-20 Summit in Osaka, India and the rest of the BRICS group (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) stressed the role that data play in economic development for emerging economies and reemphasized the need for data sovereignty. India did not sign the Osaka Declaration on the Digital Economy that kickstarted the “Osaka Track”—a process whereby the 78 signatories agreed to participate in global policy discussions on international rule-making for e-commerce at the World Trade Organization (WTO). This was a continuation of India’s sustained efforts opposing the e-commerce moratorium at the WTO.

The importance of cross-border data flows in spurring the global economy found its way into the Final G-20 Leaders Declaration—which India signed. Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale argued that international rule-making on data transfers should not take place in plurilateral forums outside the WTO. Gokhale claimed that limiting the debate to the WTO would ensure that emerging economies have a say in the framing of the rules. The clarity expressed by the Indian delegation at the G-20 should be a model for more confident Indian leadership in this global cyber policy development space.

Looking Forward

India is no newcomer to the idea of normative leadership. To overcome material shortcomings in the nation’s early years, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian prime minister, engineered a normative pivot in world affairs by championing the sovereignty of countries that had gained independence from colonial rule. In the years immediately after independence, the Indian foreign policy establishment sought to break the hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union by advancing a foreign policy rooted in what came to be known as “nonalignment.”

Making sound contributions to foreign policy in cyberspace requires a variety of experts—international lawyers, computer scientists, geopolitical strategists and human rights advocates. Indian civil society and academia are brimming with tech policy enthusiasts from a variety of backgrounds who could add in-depth substance to the government’s cyber vision. Such engagement has begun to some extent at the domestic level: Most government policies are now opened up to consultation with stakeholders Yet there is still room for greater transparency in this process.

India's cyber vision is worth fighting for. The continued monetization of data dividends by foreign big tech at the expense of India’s socioeconomic development needs to be countered. This can be accomplished by predictable and coherent policymaking that balances economic growth and innovation with the fundamental rights and values enshrined in the Indian Constitution, including the right to equality, freedom of speech and expression, and the right to life. But inherent contradictions in the conceptualization of personal data, delays in tabling the Personal Data Protection Bill, and uncertain or rushed approaches in several other regulatory policies are all fettering the realization of this vision. On core geopolitical issues, there exists an opportunity to set the rule-shaping agenda to favor India’s sovereign interests. With global cyber policy formulation in a state of flux, India has the economic, demographic and intellectual leverage to have a substantial impact on the debate and recraft the narrative in favor of the rapidly emerging Global South.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/lawfare-arindrajit-basu-november-7-2019-indias-role-in-global-cyber-policy-formulation

India’s record on internet shutdown gets bleaker; now blocked in 2 NE states

Admin — 2019-12-15T05:51:20Z

India reported over 100 internet shutdown in 2018, according to an annual study of Freedom House, a US-based non-profit research organization.

The article was published in the Hindustan Times on December 11, 2019. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The internet shutdown on Tuesday in Arunachal Pradesh and Tripura amid spiraling protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill in the Northeast is the latest in a series of such shutdowns across India, which topped the list of countries that resorted to such measures in 2018.

India reported over 100 internet shutdown in 2018, according to an annual study of Freedom House, a US-based non-profit research organization. The study on the internet and digital media freedom was conducted in over 65 countries, which cover 87% of the world’s internet users

Police and administrative authorities have cited protests and other security reasons to routinely snap the internet in India.

The Centre promulgated the Temporary Suspension of Telecom Services (Public Emergency or Public Safety) Rules, 2017, under the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885, in August 2017 for legal sanction to the shutdowns.

As per the rules, Union home ministry secretary or secretaries of state home departments can order temporary suspension of the internet. An internet suspension order has to be taken up for review within five days.

Prior to 2017, authorities could shut down the internet under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), which empowers an executive magistrate to prohibit an assembly of over four people.

Section 5 (2) of the Telegraph Act, 1855, allowed the government to prevent transmission of any telegraphic message during a public emergency or in the interest of public safety.

The Kashmir Valley has remained under an internet shutdown since August 4. The shutdown was imposed hours ahead of the nullification of the Constitution’s Article 370 that gave Jammu and Kashmir special status.

Internet and phone lines were snapped ahead of Republic Day celebrations in 2010 in one of the first reported shutdowns in the Valley. Kashmir also holds the record for the longest shutdown when the internet was snapped for 133 days after the killing of Hizbul Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani in July 2016. The current shutdown, with 122 days and counting, is the second-longest.

The 100-day blackout in Darjeeling during the Gorkha agitation in 2016 is the third-longest internet shutdown in India.

Ahead of the verdict in the Ram Janmabhoomi-Babri Masjid title suit last month, the internet was shut down in parts of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. The internet was shut down for three days in Gujarat during the agitation for a quota in jobs and educational institutes for the Patidar community in 2015.

As per the Software Freedom Law Centre, which provides free legal services to protect Free and Open Source Software, the total number of shutdowns in Indian since 2012 is more than 359. As per the tracker -- internetshutdowns.in -- which records such instances from newspaper clippings -- there have been 89 internet shutdowns in 2019, 134 in 2018, and 79 in 2017.

“As a part of this project, we track incidents of Internet shutdowns across India in an attempt to draw attention to the troubling trend of disconnecting access to Internet services, for reasons ranging from curbing unrest to preventing cheating in an examination,” it states as part of its purpose.

In September this year, the Kerala High Court held that access to the internet is a fundamental right. According to Pranesh Prakash of the Centre for Internet Society, the shutdowns are largely unlawful.

“David Kaye, the UN special rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has condemned the shutdowns and noted that the principles of proportionality and necessity should be adhered to in case of shutdowns. Yet, there have been several instances where lives have been lost in Kashmir due to the lockdown,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-december-11-2019-indias-record-on-internet-shutdown-gets-bleaker

India’s post-truth society

swaraj — 2018-09-12T12:16:31Z

The proliferation of lies and manipulative content supplies an ever-willing state a pretext to step up surveillance.

The op-ed was published in Hindu Businessline on September 7, 2018.

After a set of rumours spread over WhatsApp triggered a series of lynchings across the country, the government recently took the interesting step of placing the responsibility for this violence on WhatsApp. This is especially noteworthy because the party in power, as well as many other political parties, have taken to campaigning over social media, including using WhatsApp groups in a major way to spread their agenda and propaganda.

After all, a simple tweet or message could be shared thousands of times and make its way across the country several times, before the next day’s newspaper is out. Nonetheless, while the use of social media has led to a lot of misinformation and deliberately polarising ‘news’, it has also helped contribute to remarkable acts of altruism and community, as seen during the recent Kerala floods.

While the government has taken a seemingly techno-determinist view by placing responsibility on WhatsApp, the duality of very visible uses of social media has led to others viewing WhatsApp and other internet platforms more as a tool, at the mercy of the user. However, as historian Melvin Kranzberg noted, “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral”. And while the role of political and private parties in spreading polarising views should be rigorously investigated, it is also true that these internet platforms are creating new and sometimes damaging structural changes to how our society functions. A few prominent issues are listed below:

Fragmentation of public sphere

Jurgen Habermas, noted sociologist, conceptualised the Public Sphere as being “a network for communicating information and points of view, where the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesised in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions”.

To a large extent, the traditional gatekeepers of information flow, such as radio, TV and mainstream newspapers, performed functions enabling a public sphere. For example, if a truth-claim about an issue of national relevance was to be made, it would need to get an editor’s approval.

In case there was a counter claim, that too would have to pass an editorial check. Today however, nearly anybody can become a publisher of information online, and if it catches the right ‘influencer’s attention, it could spread far wider and far quicker than it would’ve in traditional media. While this does have the huge positive of giving space to more diverse viewpoints, it also comes with two significant downsides.

First, that it gives a sense of ‘personal space’ to public speech. An ordinary person would think a few times, do some research, and perhaps practice a speech before giving it before 10,000 people. An ordinary person would also think for perhaps five seconds before putting out a tweet on the very same topic, despite now having a potentially global audience.

Second, by having messages sent directly to your hand-held device, rather than open for anyone to fact-check and counter, there is less transparency and accountability for those who send polarising material and misinformation. How can a mistaken and polarising view be countered, if one doesn’t even know it is being made? And if it can’t be countered, how can its spread by contained?

The attention market

Not only is that earlier conception of public sphere being fragmented, these new networked public spheres are also owned by giant corporations. This means that these public spheres where critical discourse is being shaped and spread, are actually governed by advertisement-financed global conglomerates. In a world of information overflow, and privately owned, ad-financed public spheres, the new unit of currency is attention.

It is in the direct interest of the Facebooks and Googles of the world, to capture user attention as long as possible, regardless of what type of activity that encourages. It goes without saying that neither the ‘mundane and ordinary’, nor the ‘nuanced and detailed’ capture people’s attention nearly as well as the sensational and exciting.

Nearly as addicting, studies show, are the headlines and viewpoints which confirm people’s biases. Fed by algorithms that understand the human desire to ‘fit in’, people are lowered into echo chambers where like-minded people find each other and continually validate each other. When people with extremist views are guided to each other by these algorithms, they not only gather validation, but also now use these platforms to confidently air their views — thus normalising what was earlier considered extreme. Needless to say, internet platforms are becoming richer in the process.

Censorship by obfuscation

Censorship in the attention economy, no longer requires blocking of views or interrupting the transmission of information. Rather, it is sufficient to drown out relevant information in an ocean of other information. Fact checking news sites face this problem. Regardless of how often they fact-check speeches by politicians, only a minuscule percentage of the original audience comes to know about, much less care about the corrections.

Additionally, repeated attacks (when baseless) on credibility of news sources causes confusion about which sources are trustworthy. In her extremely insightful book “Twitter and Tear Gas”, Prof Zeynep Tufekci rightly points out that rather than traditional censorship, powerful entities today, (often States) focus on overwhelming people with information, producing distractions, and deliberately causing confusion, fear and doubt. Facts, often don’t matter since the goal is not to be right, but to cause enough confusion and doubt to displace narratives that are problematic to these powers.

Viewpoints from members of groups that have been historically oppressed, are especially harangued. And those who are oppressed tend to have less time, energy and emotional resources to continuously deal with online harassment, especially when their identities are known and this harassment can very easily spill over to the physical world.

Conclusion

Habermas saw the ideal public sphere as one that is free of lies, distortions, manipulations and misinformation. Needless to say, this is a far cry from our reality today, with all of the above available in unhealthy doses. It will take tremendous effort to fix these issues, and it is certainly no longer sufficient for internet platforms to claim they are neutral messengers. Further, whether the systemic changes are understood or not, if they are not addressed, they will continue to create and expand fissures in society, giving the state valid cause for intervening through backdoors, surveillance, and censorship, all actions that states have historically been happy to do!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindu-businessline-swaraj-paul-barooah-september-7-2018-indias-post-truth-society

India’s net neutrality debate is unique and complex

praskrishna — 2015-12-30T16:38:45Z

Connectivity to millions in India is main issue

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh was published in Governance Now on December 14, 2015.

The net neutrality debate has perplexed layman and policy experts alike. For a developing country like India, where a majority of the population doesn’t have access to internet, whether government should stick to the core principles or should it allow flexibility in network management practices to operators is still not clear yet. Whether India should go for an overarching, prophylactic regulation (ex ante), prohibiting any kind of zero rating, or should it adopt evidence-based, contextual regulation (ex post facto)? Whether zero rating should be allowed and if allowed then on what conditions? This is what experts from telecom industry and civil society deliberated in a round table on network neutrality jointly organised by Observer Research Foundation and Centre for Internet and Society on Saturday.

Neutrality refers to open and non-discriminatory nature of internet; information (or say data packets) has always flown freely on the network. Facebook, Google and many other internet businesses have emerged as a result of free and non discriminatory nature of internet.

Warning against taking a 'doctrinaire' approach to net neutrality, a telecom industry expert said that regulators must have flexibility to respond to market demand in the telecom industry. Adding that Indian market is unique with more than seven-ten telecom operators providing internet facility, the expert said that net neutrality will play differently in developing countries.

He said if implemented properly, the zero-rating approach or sponsored content followed by TSPs, “can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Another industry expert said that the regulations on network neutrality has to be contextualized in terms of geography. He criticized the ‘savetheinternet’ movement, which galvanised support of one million internet users in favour of strict neutrality, for preventing one billion people from accessing ‘free’ internet. He said that telecom operators’ revenue from zero rating plans is less than one percent.

He was also against bringing net neutrality under the purview of competition commission of India. He said that there are already several laws related to consumer protection, information technology and monopoly to deal with situations arising out of neutrality issue.

An internet freedom activist said that zero rating can be allowed under stringent conditions of transparency, non-exclusivity and reasonability. He said that one way of setting the neutrality debate would be to allow zero rating with an amount of equal rating. This means that telecom players can offer toll free access to certain websites but they would also have to provide free 100 Mb or 200 Mb data connectivity within which a user can access any website or app for free.

“Countries like the US can afford to debate on net neutrality as almost 90 percent of their population are connected to internet. Here (in India) we should first worry about providing internet access to our people,” an ORF researcher said, speaking on the sidelines of the roundtable discussion.

The neutrality debate is getting momentum again with TRAI’s consultation paper being released on December 9. In its second paper, TRAI suggested, “that TSPs could provide initial data consumption for free, without limiting it to any particular content. Current examples of this approach include allowing free browsing or discounted tariffs for specified time windows, or giving away a certain amount of data for free.”

The regulator also called for regulation that “must seek a balance between ensuring wider access to the internet,” and in the manner that does not allow discrimination in charging tariffs from the users consuming varied content. The regulator has asked all stakeholders in telecom industry to come up with alternative methods in order to provide free access of internet to the consumers, and keep competition and innovation in the market intact.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india2019s-net-neutrality-debate-is-unique-and-complex

India’s National ID Program May Be Turning The Country Into A Surveillance State

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T12:49:30Z

For seven years, India’s government has been scanning the irises and fingerprints of its citizens into a massive database. The once voluntary program was intended to fix the country’s corrupt welfare schemes, but critics worry about its Orwellian overtones.

The blog post by Pranav Dixit was published by BuzzFeedNews on April 4, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

An abridged version of the blog post containing Sunil Abraham's quotes are reproduced below:

“You can’t change your fingerprints”

Sunil Abraham, the CIS director, calls himself a “technological critic” of the Aadhaar platform. For years, he’s been warning of the security risks associated with a centralized repository of the demographic and biometric details of a billion or so people.

“Aadhaar is a sitting duck,” Abraham told BuzzFeed News. That’s not an unreasonable assessment considering that India’s track record for protecting people’s private data is far from stellar. Earlier this year, for example, a security researcher discovered a website that was leaking the Aadhaar demographic data of more than 500,000 minors. The website was subsequently shut down, but the incident raised questions about Aadhaar’s security protocols — particularly those around data shared with third parties.

Abraham’s concerns are not without global precedent. In 2012, Ecuadorian police jailed blogger Paul Moreno for breaking into the country’s online national identity database and registering himself as Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. In April 2016, hackers posted a database containing names, national IDs, addresses, and birth dates of more than 50 million Turkish citizens, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan; later that month, Mexico’s entire voter database — over 87 million national IDs, addresses, and more — was leaked onto Amazon’s cloud servers by as-yet-untraced sources; and in the Philippines, more than 55 million voters had their private information — including fingerprints — released on the Dark Web.

“When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data.”

“What is the price that we pay as a nation if our database of over a billion people — complete with all 10 fingerprints and iris scans — leaks?” Abraham asked. The consequences, he said, will be permanent. Unlike a password, which you can reset at any time, your biometrics, if compromised, are the ultimate privacy breach. “You can’t change your fingerprints.”

The UIDAI claims that the Aadhaar database is protected using the “highest available public key cryptography encryption (PKI-2048 and AES-256)” and would take “billions of years” to crack.

“Encryption like this doesn’t typically get broken, it gets circumvented,” security researcher Troy Hunt told BuzzFeed News. “For example, the web application that sits in front of it is compromised and data is retrieved after decryption.” Or alternatively, he said, the encryption key itself is compromised. “Naturally, governments will offer all sorts of assurances on these things, but the simple, immutable fact is that once large volumes are centralized like this, there is a heightened risk of security incidents and of the data consequently being lost or exposed,” he added.

Cryptographer and cybersecurity expert Bruce Schneier echoed Hunt’s assessment. “When this database is hacked — and it will be — it will be because someone breaches the computer security that protects the computers actually using the data,” he said. “They will go around the encryption.”

Nilekani — who did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ requests for comment — recently dismissed concerns around the project’s privacy implications as “hand-waving.” In an interview with the Economic Times, he repeatedly stressed how secure Aadhaar’s “advanced encryption technology” was. “I can categorically say that it’s the most secure system in India and among the most secure systems in the world,” he said.

Abraham is unconvinced by such assurances. He believes Aadhaar fundamentally changes the equation between a citizen and a state. “There’s a big difference between you identifying yourself to the government, and the government identifying who you are,” he said.

Aadhaar’s opponents say the program’s implementation has left India’s poorest people with no choice but to use it. “If you link people’s food subsidies, wages, bank accounts, and other crucial things to Aadhaar, you hit them where it hurts the most,” Ramanathan argued. “You leave them with no choice but to sign up.”

“Can you imagine if the United States passed a law that said that every person who wished to get food stamps would need their fingerprints registered in a government-owned database?” a journalist turned Aadhaar activist who did not wished to be named told BuzzFeed News. “Imagine what a scandal that would be.”

For Nilekani, such criticism is just overstatement and drama. “I think this so-called anti-Aadhaar lobby is really just a small bunch of liberal elites who are in some echo chamber,” he said during a recent interview with Indian business news channel ET Now. “The reality is that a billion people are using Aadhaar. A lot of the accusations are just delusional. Aadhaar is not a system for surveillance. [The critics] live in a bubble and are not connected to reality.”

Abraham laughed off Nilekani’s comments. “The Unique Identification Authority of India will become the monopoly provider of identification and authentication services in India,” he said. “That sounds like a centrally planned communist state to me. I don’t know which left liberal elites he’s talking about.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/buzzfeednews-pranav-dixit-april-4-2017-indias-national-id-program-may-be-turning-the-country-into-a-surveillance-state

India’s largest bank SBI leaked account data on millions of customers

Admin — 2019-02-01T15:13:15Z

India’s largest bank has secured an unprotected server that allowed anyone to access financial information on millions of its customers, like bank balances and recent transactions.

The blog post by Zack Whittaker was published Tech Crunch on January 30, 2019. Karan Saini was quoted.

The server, hosted in a regional Mumbai-based data center, stored two months of data from SBI Quick, a text message and call-based system used to request basic information about their bank accounts by customers of the government-owned State Bank of India (SBI), the largest bank in the country and a highly ranked company in the Fortune 500.

But the bank had not protected the server with a password, allowing anyone who knew where to look to access the data on millions of customers’ information.

It’s not known for how long the server was open, but long enough for it to be discovered by a security researcher, who told TechCrunch of the leak, but did not want to be named for the story.

SBI Quick allows SBI’s banking customers to text the bank, or make a missed call, to retrieve information back by text message about their finances and accounts. It’s ideal for millions of the banking giant’s customers who don’t use smartphones or have limited data service. By using predefined keywords, like “BAL” for a customer’s current balance, the service recognizes the customer’s registered phone number and will send back the current amount in that customer’s bank account. The system can also be used to send back the last five transactions, block an ATM card and make inquiries about home or car loans.

It was the back-end text message system that was exposed, TechCrunch can confirm, storing millions of text messages each day.

A redacted example of some of the banking and credit information found in the database (Image: TechCrunch)

The passwordless database allowed us to see all of the text messages going to customers in real time, including their phone numbers, bank balances and recent transactions. The database also contained the customer’s partial bank account number. Some would say when a check had been cashed, and many of the bank’s sent messages included a link to download SBI’s YONO app for internet banking.

The bank sent out close to three million text messages on Monday alone.

The database also had daily archives of millions of text messages each, going back to December, allowing anyone with access a detailed view into millions of customers’ finances.

We verified the data by asking India-based security researcher Karan Saini to send a text message to the system. Within seconds, we found his phone number in the database, including the text message he received back.

“The data available could potentially be used to profile and target individuals that are known to have high account balances,” said Saini in a message to TechCrunch. Saini previously found a data leak in India’s Aadhaar, the country’s national identity database, and a two-factor bypass bug in Uber’s ridesharing app.

Saini said that knowing a phone number “could be used to aid social engineering attacks — which is one of the most common attack vectors in the country with regard to financial fraud,” he said.

SBI claims more than 500 million customers across the glob,e with 740 million accounts.

Just days earlier, SBI accused Aadhaar’s authority, UIDAI, of mishandling citizen data that allowed fake Aadhaar identity cards to be created, despite numerous security lapses and misuse of the system. UIDAI denied the report, saying there was “no security breach” of its system. (UIDAI often uses the term “fake news” to describe coverage it doesn’t like.)

TechCrunch reached out to SBI and India’s National Critical Information Infrastructure Protection Centre, which receives vulnerability reports for the banking sector. The database was secured overnight.

Despite several emails, SBI did not comment prior to publication.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/tech-crunch-zak-whittaker-january-30-2019-indias-largest-bank-sbi-leaked-account-data-on-millions-of-customers

India’s internet shutdowns are costing the economy billions of dollars

Admin — 2018-07-31T16:54:01Z

Frequent internet shutdowns have begun to hurt the Indian economy.

The blog post by Sushma UN was published in Quartz India on July 31, 2018. Akriti Bopanna was quoted.

In recent years, various regional governments and authorities have displayed a growing tendency to simply switch off internet connectivity to contain social and political disturbances. It has already peaked this year.

In just the first seven months of 2018, there have been 92 such incidents across the country; in all of 2017, there were only 79, according to data from internetshutdowns.in. The website’s findings are based on data collected by New Delhi-based pro bono legal services firm Software Freedom Law Center.

“The economic impact itself is very high because our entire economy is gravitating towards internet connectivity,” said Praveen Bhadada, partner at Zinnov Management Consulting. “The estimate is anywhere between $1 billion to $3 billion of productivity losses (over the last five years) because of these outages.”

Most instances of internet shutdowns in India are knee-jerk responses to political turmoil. The latest was reported in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra, last week. However, state governments are now resorting to it even during local examinations so as to curb cheating.

While the UN has declared access to the internet a basic human right, some argue that shutdowns are effective in certain cases.

“In times of communal riots…internet shutdown is one vehicle through which you can control the situation,” Bhadada of Zinnov said. “Unless and until one is able to ensure that information is accurate and used in the right light, one has to be a little more guarded.”

What India needs to do now is to work on clear guidelines on when such shutdowns can be ordered. While India’s telecom regulator allows for shutdowns, there is ambiguity around when and why this can be done.

“The government should start with updating the rules for internet shutdowns to have specific, narrowly-defined situations in which shutdowns could be effectuated, if at all. The aim should be no or minimum disruption, as a method of last resort,” said Akriti Bopanna, policy officer with Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based non-profit organisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/quartz-india-sushma-un-july-31-2018-indias-internet-shutdowns-are-costing-the-economy-billions-of-dollars

India’s internet missionaries: The women Google is relying on to spread its Next Billion message

Admin — 2017-11-23T02:33:35Z

Google’s internet saathis have brought 11.5 million women in 105,000 villages online. But there’s a catch: the women are taught to use only Google products.

The article by Sunny Sen was published by Livemint on November 21, 2017.

Until Google came calling at Khaula, one of the nearly 100,000 villages in Uttar Pradesh, early in 2016, few among the womenfolk there had heard about the internet. A few had seen their men watching videos on smartphones, but none had accessed the internet on her own.

Now, more than 1,100 women in Khaula and neighbouring villages know how to access the internet and regularly log in. They teach their children, they teach themselves new skills, they look up fixes to niggling medical problems, and watch YouTube videos.

Khaula is ground zero for an ambitious Google initiative called Next Billion to spread use of the internet in developing economies. The initiative rides on the shoulders of women—internet saathis, who have been roped in to carry the “here’s how to access the internet” message across India. The success or failure of the saathis (saathi means friend in Hindi) in the internet literacy project will make or break the programme.

India, whose over 400 million data consumers make it the No. 2 market by internet users, only behind China, is the top focus country in the Next Billion programme. The project also covers Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and parts of Africa.

The internet saathi programme, run by Google along with Tata Trusts is designed in such a way that two-three women in a village are handpicked and trained to use the internet. They, then, further train thousands of village women—not men—on how to access it. This design is with good reason: less than one-third of internet users in India are women and the number is far lower in its villages, explained Rajan Anandan, Google’s vice president for Southeast Asia and India, in a Mint newspaper article in April.

Neetu’s story

Four years ago, Neetu Bhagour, now 22, had made news in the village when she won a state-level wrestling event and was selected at the national level. But, she never made it to the nationals. “My parents didn’t allow me to… girls in our villages are not allowed to play much,” Bhagour said, her disappointment showing in her smile.

After leaving wrestling, she decided to pursue studies. The college was far away from the village and she didn’t attend every day, yet completed her graduation in science earlier this year—one of the few to do so in Khaula.

It was on one of the days she was home, bunking college, that her uncle told her that if she had time, she could teach village women how to access the internet. That was about one-and-a-half years ago.

“I had only seen my brother using (the internet). He had an Android phone, but he would never let us use it,” Bhagour said. “I decided to learn how to use the internet. People from Google trained us for three-four days… That was the first time I used the internet.”

Google gave her a Lava smartphone and a Celkon tablet—both entry-level brands—to use and train other village women. The cost of the two devices was around Rs11,000, a price that the women of Khaula would perhaps never be able to afford. The trainers also get an umbrella and 2GB of monthly data for each device—all provided by Google.

Till now Google has spent about Rs50 crore on training 35,000 saathis. That’s a tab of between Rs14,000 and Rs15,000 per saathi which includes the Rs11,000 spent on the devices, umbrella and data.

It was not easy for Bhagour to convince women in her village that learning to access the internet would be useful. Often they would scoff at her: “We don’t need it.” She stayed persistent. “It’s okay if you don’t need the internet, but teach it to your children,” she told them. “Use Google to know anything in this world.”

Next billion

Bhagour is one of the 35,000 internet saathis in India Google is backing. And, in a move atypical of the search giant, it is pouring crores of rupees training them. “Tata Trusts are equally funding the initiative for us. Google brings in the devices, the data, and the technical know-how of training the saathis. And Tata Trusts are managing the on-ground implementation, the saathi stipend,” said Neha Barjatya, head of ads marketing & digitizing initiatives, Google India.

The saathis are trained on how the web works, especially how to use various Google products such as Chrome, Search, YouTube, and PlayStore. They are not trained to use any other product, not Facebook or WhatsApp.

Since the beginning of the internet saathis project in 2015, Google has covered 105,000 villages in 12 states and taught 11.5 million women how to use the internet—making it the biggest project by Google under its Next Billion initiative and perhaps the single largest such outreach programme anywhere in the world.

Google wants to take the programme to 300,000 villages. “These women discover the internet (through Google and its products), and eventually discover how to use the internet for their needs,” said Barjatya.

Internet hard-sell

It wasn’t easy for Bhagour or any of the other saathis, initially.

Deepa Rajput of Dehtora village (near Khaula) is a Ph.D in Hindi. She teaches at the Shree Jagdamba Degree College in Agra. She was introduced to the internet saathi initiative by a friend of her husband’s. “Our family is one of the progressive ones in the village, so it was easy to convince my in-laws,” said Rajput.

But when she went out to teach, it was a problem. At the start, women didn’t allow her to take their picture, which is needed to enrol them in the programme. Some even refused to fill the enrolment form.

Rajput’s pitch was simple, yet compelling. “Google pe saara vishwa ka jankari prapt kar sakte hai… Agar aapka bhains bimar ho jata hai toh aap uske karan dekh sakte hai (You can find the entire world’s information on Google… If your buffalo falls sick, you find the reasons there),” she told the village women.

Most women liked the idea but they had to take the permission of their in-laws and husbands. “Women are weak… their survival depends on how much their husbands provide,” Rajput said.

When Google first went to a few villages in 2013, it started by training women directly for three-four hours. This was done at a school or the village community centre. It didn’t work out. The turnout was dismal. Folks at Google knew that they had to fix it if they had to expand beyond towns.

A pilot was done in a village near the Maheshwar town in Madhya Pradesh. Google piloted something called the internet cart, like an ice cream cart, which had internet-enabled tablets. Google-contracted agents would go from village to village, home to home, with these carts and teach the village women how to use the internet.

But, even that wasn’t enough. Google realized that it was important to stay in the village for a long period of time and keep training the women. That’s when the internet saathi concept was born.

The other problem was that women didn’t have devices to access the internet on. So Google gave them devices and free data. In 2015, Google and Tata Trusts started identifying trainers. Initially, Google also provided the saathis with a cycle in 1,500 villages, but stopped it as the women preferred walking.

Changing lives

For many of these beneficiaries, the internet is the only form of empowerment. For Deepmala, a primary school teacher in Atus village not far from Khaula, the internet helps her children learn English. “Children often ask things we don’t know… I have started using Google to explain things to children,” she said.

Deepmala’s first acquaintance with the internet was when she enrolled to become a saathi. She has trained 1,500 women since then. It wasn’t easy to convince her husband to allow her to learn how to use the internet but his mother stepped in. “My mother-in-law allowed me to learn… she used to go with me for the training,” she said.

For all the world that the internet has opened up for her, some centuries-old habits haven’t changed. Deepmala doesn’t know much about her husband’s work or what he earns. All she knows is that her husband works in a shoe factory near Agra. Without her mother-in-law’s backing, Deepmala said, she wouldn’t have been able to become a saathi.

When she showed the village women the internet, they were initially afraid to use it. There are a lot of myths about the ills of the internet in the villages. Rightly so, as often boys and men in the villages click pictures of girls and upload them to porn sites.

Women are shy and shun anything that may intrude on their privacy. It is in such a context that the world of information—access to Bollywood, culture, lifestyle, pornography, information, email, voice calling, and dozens of applications—suddenly opened up to them.

The saathis need to have a minimum education of up to Class VIII and should be comfortable with English. But there are no restrictions on the saathis to pick educated women. Many of their students don’t know how to read or write. For them, Deepa Rajput of Dehtora village said, Google voice commands are the easiest way to search the internet. “Women are seeing videos condemning domestic violence and oppression of women… That is a big change,” she said.

Making money

Deepmala, the school teacher saathi, taught women to search for mehendi designs and facial makeup on Google and YouTube. “Some of them have even started searching new salwar and blouse designs… The women tailors make more money for these designs,” she said.

Some women have started charging Rs50 for drawing mehendi designs. Others have started using the internet to look for agriculture and health-related information.

There are other avenues of making money, too. Deepmala and few of the women she trained landed a contract from research firm Nielsen to do a survey of the villages and the shops, for which they were paid. A list of 96 shops was given to them with a list of 80 questions. “The form was on the internet, we surveyed these villages and filled the form. It was about things like what products are sold, which shops have shut down, updating contact information…,” said Deepmala.

Monica Sisodiya from Barhan village has trained 2,000 women, most of them who are young. After being trained by Monica, two of them opened a beauty parlour. “She gets customers from 10-12 villages because of the new ways she has introduced,” said Monica, who wanted to study law in Agra, but couldn’t because her family wouldn’t allow her to go to the city. She is now pursuing a nursing course at Maa Bhagwati College, 7km from her home.

Google makes most of its revenue by serving digital ads. As more people join the internet and as more of them use the worldwide web, Google can negotiate with brands to get a higher share of the digital advertizing wallet.

Others like Babita Singh are evidence that the lack of information access is not a problem of the poor alone. Babita, 20, whose father is an intelligence officer with the Uttar Pradesh police, lives in a house that is prosperous by Dehtora standards. Her house has four CCTV cameras monitoring the front and rear of the building. The images are captured on a 42-inch LED television on the living room wall.

Yet, Babita used the internet for the first time only four months ago after getting trained by Deepa. Babita refers to the Chrome browser as ‘kromee’. She said she uses the internet to fill forms for banking entrance exams. At leisure, she browses designs of cushion covers and sweaters and tries out new food recipes that she pulls up from the Net.

Babita’s neighbour, Malti Rajput, teaches in a school for the mentally challenged in a nearby village. She isn’t well off and got her first phone from Google.

“We have started using the internet in our schools to teach the children dance steps… They also see craft designs. We sell some of these products to raise some money for the children,” said Malti.

It’s business, of course

For Google, this is not any corporate social responsibility activity. It is about getting every individual in India online. “This is not a social initiative for us. It is very much a business or marketing objective,” said Barjatya.

Getting more people to use the internet lies at the heart of Google’s business. Google makes most of its revenue by serving digital ads. As more people join the internet and as more of them use the worldwide web, Google can negotiate with brands to get a higher share of the digital advertizing wallet.

Barjatya said Google does not measure what it is getting back from the initiative. “It’s very much to get these women online and the rest will follow,” she said. “We are only seeing how many villages and how many women are coming online, and how does it tie back into our Next Billion initiative.”

But experts say Google alone can’t change rural India. “Google is probably worried that rural India might end up like Myanmar where most users stay within Facebook and do not explore the rest of the internet,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of Bengaluru-based research organization Centre for Internet and Society.

Click here for enlarge

Moving the needle

All the saathis FactorDaily spoke with said that at their training sessions they are taught only how to use Google products, apart from handling the hardware. Those, too, only on Android phones. No Facebook, no WhatsApp, no Snapchat, no Twitter, no Paytm, no Flipkart...

“This is a smart business decision for Google but it does not really bridge the digital divide. We need all stakeholders, including Google to work together to reduce the cost of hardware and connectivity,” Abraham said.

Still, a Google-commissioned study by research firm Ipsos suggests that the internet giant has made some headway in rural India. Here are some pointers from the study:

■ 90% of women who have attended the training have a better understanding of the internet

■ 25% of women continue to use the internet (Gujarat is the highest at 35%)

■ 7% of women trained under the program feel that their social standing has improved

■ 33% trained women think that their economic condition has improved by learning new skills

■ 1% increase in village income in instances where training was conducted

Even though most of the women are not taught to use Facebook and WhatsApp, most of them eventually get on to social media. This is little consolation for Facebook, which has failed to mainstream itself in rural India the way Google has.

While Google gets a large number of the first-time users, some of the women have also started buying things online. Mamta Mahour of Bijpuri village bought earphones and books from Amazon and a saree from Voonik. The products are delivered at one of the shops in the village and Mamta collects it from there.

Some of the households have also started disconnecting their cable connections, said Mamta. Her’s and Deepmala’s houses are two, for instance. Deepmala watches ‘Piya Albela’ and ‘Big Boss’ on YouTube. “We can watch it anytime. There is so much (power) load-shedding that you can’t watch an entire episode on television… that’s not the case on YouTube,” she said.

Slow going

Mamta has taken a Reliance Jio connection. She watches her shows on JioTV and YouTube. “JioTV is free. I don’t see the need of having a cable connection at home. Rather I would use that money to recharge my phone,” she said.

Still, the going is grindingly slow. While Google has been successful in teaching women in these villages to use the internet, three out of four stop using the internet after the training.

When the saathi project started, internet penetration in villages was about 10%, said Barjatya. A recent report by industry lobby Internet and Mobile Association of India and market researcher Kantar IMRB shows that it has gone up to 17%.

Barjatya said Google spent a lot of time understanding the needs of the rural India. These 11.5 million women trained by Google have at least been introduced to the internet. “Over time we have seen that they have found value in going and buying a smartphone,” Barjatya is optimistic.

The data story in India is changing, especially after the launch of Reliance Jio. Google is already in talks with Reliance Jio to provide 4GB of 4G data at Rs149 a month to the saathis. Right now it is 2GB of 2G data.

The feedback from the saathis, meanwhile, is that the training module needs to change: the time is too short to train someone who had never used the internet, according to them. The saathis were given the target of training 250 women in a week, based on which they would receive a stipend from Tata Trust. It varies between Rs4 and Rs8 for each woman trained.

Barjatya said the target has been brought down to 100 women a month.

Changing data story

While Google has set up a call centre to check how many beneficiaries use the internet after training, there is no way it can ensure that women continue to use it. Call centre agents make random calls to check if the training is sufficient and if they are using the internet. Google might also contemplate returning to the same village to train more women.

Also, very few women own devices in male-dominated rural Indian society. “We haven’t really got into creating access beyond spreading awareness. However, yes, this is something we are open to and can consider. But right now it is just the literacy part,” Barjatya said, talking about subsidising mobile phones for women in villages.

In the next two years, Google will need more devices and more data. For its target of covering 300,000 villages, it will need an army of about 100,000 saathis— nearly a 10-fold jump.

Meanwhile, back at Khaula, Bhagour, the former wrestler, has started studying for the entrance test to join Delhi police. YouTube, she said, is handy for her studies. She is learning tricks to solve math problems quicker. Something else happened on Dhanteras, the festival to worship wealth, that made Bhagour proud.

“I got Rs4,211 for training the women. I got the money on the day of Dhanteras,” she said. “I gave the money to my father to get the house painted.”

This story has been published in association with FactorDaily.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/sunny-sen-livemint-november-23-2017-indias-internet-missionaries