We are anonymous, we are legion

December 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2013-01-16T05:15:27Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society wish you all a great year ahead. In the December 2012 newsletter, we bring you the draft early chapters of our “National Resource Kit” project for persons with disabilities (covering four southern states); and accessibility-related comments on the Twelfth Five Year Plan; the draft research on pervasive technologies and access to knowledge that we presented at the Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest in Brazil; our comments on the privacy implications of including RFID tags in the proposed Rule 138A of the Motor Vehicle Rules, a report on the open access lectures delivered by Prof. Leslie Chan during his tour of India, reports of Wikipedia-related workshops conducted across three cities, and news and media coverage.

Jobs

CIS is seeking applications for the posts of Programme Officer (Access to Knowledge — Indic Language Initiatives), Developer (NVDA Project), Research Manager (Digital Humanities project), and Policy Associate (Access to Knowledge and Openness) and Policy Associate (Internet Governance). To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org and pranesh@cis-india.org.

Accessibility

National Resource Kit for Persons with Disabilities
CIS received a grant of INR 54,83,200 from the Hans Foundation for Creating a National Kit of Laws, Policies and Programs for Persons with Disabilities on August 16, 2012. Anandhi Vishwanathan from CIS and Shruti Ramakrishnan from the Centre for Law and Policy Research are the researchers presently working for this project. Early draft chapters have been published. Feedback and comments are invited from the readers:

The Tamil Nadu Chapter (by Shruti Ramakrishnan, December 30, 2012).
The Karnataka Chapter (by Shruti Ramakrishnan, December 30, 2012).
The Kerala Chapter (by Anandi Vishwanathan, December 31, 2012).
The Andhra Chapter (by Anandi Vishwanathan, December 31, 2012).

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Event Organised

2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest (FGV Law School, Rio de Janeiro, December 15 – 17, 2012). The Second Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest was organized by Fundação Getulio Vargas, American University Washington College of Law, Columbia University, Open AIR, and ICSTD. Sunil Abraham and Pranesh Prakash participated in the event. Pranesh was one of the moderators in the Roundtable Discussion on Priority Policy Forums, Research and Analysis Needs and Commitments.

Research for the Global Congress

For the 2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and Public Interest event, CIS conducted research. Jadine Lannon (based on research by Annapoornima and Rohan George and with help from Yogesh Kumar did research on documentation of phones and their patent, Amba Kak did research on copyright and mobile licensing, Vikrant Vasudev conducted research on patent pools and valuation methods, Hans Varghese Mathews did research on mathematical models of patent pools and Nehaa Chaudhuri did research on analysis of 3Gand 4G patent pools.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Event Report

Random Hacks of Kindness Global December 2012 — A Report (by Yogesh Londhe, December 10, 2012). Event was hosted at CIS office in Bangalore. CIS, Amnesty International India Office, Greenpeace India Office, HasGeek, Yahoo Research & Development and SimpleTechLife sponsored the event held in CIS office in Bangalore on December 1 and 2, 2012.

Events Participated

‘Information & Networks’ Partners’ Meeting (organised by International Development Research Centre, Canada in Rio de Janeiro, December 11 – 12, 2013). Sunil Abraham spoke in session on Open Business and IP.

Open Access Champion Leslie Chan Delivers Five Talks in India (Department of Library & Information Science, University of Kerala, National Institute of Interdisciplinary Science & Technology, CSIR, Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management – Kerala, Manasa Media Centre, Mysore University Library and SDM Institute for Management Development, December 17 – 20, 2012).

Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia Project)
Beginning from September 1, 2012, Wikimedia Foundation has awarded CIS a two-year grant of INR 26,000,000 to support and develop free knowledge in India. The A2K team consists of three members based in Delhi: Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval.

Events Organised

Wikipedia Workshop at NMAIT (NMAIT, Karkala Taluk, December 21, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute).
Wikipedia Workshop at SRM (SRM University, Chennai, December 17, 2012, co-organised in association with Metawings Institute).
Marathi Wiki Workshop at TISS (Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, December 8, 2012).

Blog Entries

Non Unicode ISCII Text Can be Converted to Unicode Now! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, December 19, 2012).
New Avenues: Media Wiki Groups (by Noopur Raval, December 28, 2012).

News / Media Coverage

A Report of Odia Wikipedia Workshop at IIT, Kharagpur (Samaja, Odia daily, Kolkata edition, December 3, 2012).

Videos

Wikipedia: State of Tech — A Talk by Erik Moeller (CIS, Bangalore, November 12, 2012). Erik Moeller, Vice President of Engineering and Product Development at the Wikimedia Foundation gave a talk.
Art in the Open Source Age — A Talk by Gene Kogan (CIS, Bangalore, November 30, 2012). Gene Kogan, a programmer and digital artist gave a talk.

HasGeek
HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru.

Upcoming Event

Meta Refresh (MLR Convention Centre, JP Nagar, Bangalore, February 22 and 23, 2013).

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Analysis of Central Motor Vehicle Rules

Comments on the Proposed Rule 138A of the Central Motor Vehicle Rules, 1989 Concerning Radio Frequency Identification Tags (by Bhairav Acharya, December 3, 2012).

Columns/Op-eds

Online Censorship: How Government should Approach Regulation of Speech (by Sunil Abraham, Economic Times, December 5, 2012).
The Worldwide Web of Concerns (by Pranesh Prakash, Deccan Chronicle, and Asian Age, December 10, 2012).
The Trouble with Hurried Solutions (by Chinmayi Arun, The Hindu, December 15, 2012).
Tomorrow, Today (Nishant Shah, The Indian Express, December 29, 2012).

Event Organised

Meeting of the Network of Internet & Society Centers (organised by Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet & Society, Center for Technology & Society, KEIO University SFC, the MIT Media Lab, the MIT Center for Civic Media, NEXA Center for Internet & Society and CIS, Cambridge, Massachusetts, December 6 – 8, 2012).

Upcoming Events

DML Conference 2013 (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2012).

Events Participated

Second International e-Governance Conference (organized by the National Committee for Corporate Governance Electronic Iraq and the United Nations Development Programme, Rashid Hotel, Baghdad, December 2, 2012). Sunil Abraham presented on "Review of the Legal Environment in Iraq for Effective e-Governance".
Seminar/Artist Talks : "Outresourcing" with the Transmediale Collective (organised by the Berlin - Transmediale new media collective, December 3, 2012, Bangalore). Sharath Chandra Ram presented a White Paper.
World Conference on International Telecommunications (organised by ITU, December 3 – 14). Chinmayi Arun participated as a civil society representative.
Internet Driven Developments: Structural Changes and Tipping Points (organised by Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Cambridge, Massachusetts at Harvard University, December 6 – 8, 2012).
Annual Conference on Human Rights 2012 (organised by Estonian Institute of Human Rights and Google). Malavika Jayaram participated as a panelist.
State Surveillance and Human Rights Camp (Sheraton Rio Hotel & Resort, Rio, Brazil, December 13 and 14, 2012). Elonnai Hickok made a presentation on MLATS and International Cooperation for Law Enforcement Purposes.
Economic Impact of Internet in India (organised by Aspen Institute India, December 21, 2012). Chinmayi Arun attended this event.

Blog Entries

Transcripts from WCIT-12 (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 3, 2012).
Section 66-A, Information Technology Act, 2000: Cases (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 3, 2012).
Internet-driven Developments — Structural Changes and Tipping Points (by Elonnai Hickok, December 28, 2012).
State Surveillance and Human Rights Camp: Summary (by Elonnai Hickok, December 31, 2012).
Mining the Web Collective (by Sharath Chandra Ram, December 31, 2012).

Video

Technology Culture and Events in South East Asia — A Presentation by Preetam Rai (CIS, Bangalore, December 18, 2012). Preetam Rai gave a lecture.

Media Coverage

66A ‘cut & paste job’ (by GS Mudur, Telegraph, December 3, 2012). Pranesh Prakash and Snehashish Ghosh are quoted.
Ayodhya trending on Twitter sparks censorship concerns (by Surabhi Agarwal, December 6, 2012). Sunil Abraham is quoted.
Debate on Section 66A rages on (Vasudha Venugopal, The Hindu, December 10, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Hacktivists deface BSNL website (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 13, 2012).
Govt likely to issue guidelines to clarify IT rules soon (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, December 16, 2012).
The freedom of expression debate: The State must mend fences with The Web (by Rahul Jayaram, India Today, December 18, 2012).
‘The IT Act is fine, but its interpretation is not’ (DNA, December 19, 2012).
No fear of losing internet freedom till Jan 15: Experts (by Kim Arora, The Times of India, December 22, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
UN agrees to review agencies governing Internet (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, December 27, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
Delhi gang rape: What Facebook, Twitter expose about govt (The Times of India, December 31, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted.
A note of dissent on cash transfers and UID (The Hindu, December 31, 2012). Sunil Abraham was one of the signatories.
The year social media came of age in India (by Javed Anwer and Rukmini Shrinivasan, The Times of India, December 31, 2012). Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Newspaper Column

Inflation Control Through Structural Reforms (by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, December 11, 2012).

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India
Ford Foundation has given a grant of USD 2,00,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. The knowledge repository deals with these modules: Introduction to Telecommunications, Telecommunications Infrastructure and Technologies, Government of India Regulatory Framework for Telecom, Telecommunication and the Market, Universal Access and Accessibility, The International Telecommunications Union and other international bodies, Broadcasting, Emerging Topics and Way Forward. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers.

The following are the new outputs:

Licensing Framework for Telecom: A Historical Overview (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 31, 2012).
Market Structure in the Telecom Industry (by Snehashish Ghosh, December 31, 2012).

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Book Review

Not Just Fancy Television (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, December 8, 2012): Nishant Shah reviews Ben Hammersley's book "64 Things You Need to Know for Then: How to Face the Digital Future Without Fear ", published by Hodder & Stoughton.

Media Coverage

What does it mean to be a digital native? (by Oliver Joy, CNN, December 8, 2012).

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc. CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO, and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at http://cis-india.org

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

Request for Collaboration
We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant@cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to its donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2012-bulletin

December 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-23T08:35:03Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of December 2011. This issue carries a special section on Freedom of Expression as there was much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscapes of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and internet technologies, in emerging information societies. The collaboration has produced a four book collective around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post Arab spring world, a position paper, a scouting report and three international workshops in Taipei, Johannesburg and Santiago.

Blog Entry

The Digital Other: Nishant Shah raises his concerns that increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so. The blog post was published in DML Central, 14 December 2011.

Events

Digital Native Video Contest, jointly organised by CIS and Hivos. Submission guidelines and FAQs are online. Submit your proposal online by 26 January 2012.
Digital AlterNatives Tweet-a-Review, 17 – 26 December 2011: 'Digital Natives with a Cause?' Project invites readers to review essays from the 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause', a four-book collective published by Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos.

Book Reviews

Unpacking Digital Natives from their Shiny Packaging: “The ‘Digital Natives’ concept is neither necessarily nor inherently positive, as YiPing Tsou highlights in her chapter Digital Natives in the Name of a Cause: From Flash Mob to "Human Flesh Search.” — Argyri Panezi
On Natives, Norms and Knowledge: “It is a text I strongly recommend, especially to those interested in the reasons behind contemporary policies that try to regulate digital activism such as the US SOPA Act.” — Philip Ketzel
Digital Native: Twin Manifestations or Co-Located Hybrids: “Ben-David’s piece is a well-articulated and informed attempt to resolve two of the several conceptual fuzziness of the term Digital Native. She attempts this in a philosophical manner: trying to move away from the ontological who are Digital Natives? to an epistemological when and where are Digital Natives?” — Samuel Tettner

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between technologies, higher education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Workshop Report

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy: Nishant Shah captures some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore

Blog Post

Technology, Social Justice and Higher Education by Nishant Shah, 7 December 2011.

Event Organised

Pathways 3rd Faculty Workshop & Regional Facilitators Meeting at CSCS, 8–10 December 2011, CSCS, Bangalore, Nishant Shah participated in the workshop.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies. So far we have organised Right to Read campaigns in the four metro cities of Chennai, Kolkata, Delhi and Mumbai, made a submission to amend the Indian Copyright to the HRD Ministry, researched on accessible mobile handsets in India, analysed the Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, and published a policy handbook on e-accessibility and a book on universal service for persons with disabilities.

Publications

Universal Service for Persons with Disabilities: Published by G3ict and CIS in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. The book is co-authored by Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict, Deepti Bharthur and Nirmita Narasimhan.
The Business Case for Web Accessibility: NASSCOM Foundation has published a handbook on web accessibility titled “Understanding Web Accessibility — A Guide to Create Accessible Work Environments”. Nirmita Narasimhan authored a chapter “The Business Case for Web Accessibility”.

Submission

Accessibility in the New Telecom Policy 2011: CIS was part of the 27 organisations that responded to the call for comments on NTP 2011. The submission was made to the Department of Telecommunications, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Government of India on 9 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview of Nirmita Narasimhan on ITU Portal: ITU Girls in ICT is now online! ITU interviewed Nirmita and published her profile on their website.

Award

Nirmita receives NIVH Award: Nirmita Narasimhan received the NIVH Excellence Award from Justice AS Anand (retd), former chairman of the National Human Rights Commission, on International Day of Persons with Disabilities at the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped in Dehradun on Saturday, 3 December 2011. The Tribune covered the award ceremony and published this in their newspaper on 3 December 2011.

Upcoming Event

ITU Meeting and Tutorial on Audiovisual Media Accessibility, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, India International Centre, 13 – 15 March 2012. CIS is hosting the workshop in collaboration with the ITU-APT Foundation. More information and registration are available at the ITU website.

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. We prepared the India report for the CI IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast treaty, questioned the demonization of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Comments

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement
The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) was held in Geneva on 30 November and 1 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event and made the intervention.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of 16 December 2009 during the seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) held in Geneva.

Blog Post

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes: Verbindingen/Jonctions (V/J), the bi-annual multidisciplinary festival organised by Constant took place on 1 December 2011. CIS hosted the scanned pages of the essay in public domain.

Openness

Innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of Internet has radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. The Internet itself is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. Our endeavour has resulted in a report on open government data, a report on online video environment in India and a film on oral citations on the Wikipedia.

Award

Inaugural EPT Award for Open Access: The Electronic Publishing Trust for Development is pleased to announce the winners of a new annual award to be made to individuals working in developing countries who have made a significant personal contribution to advancing the cause of open access (OA) and the free exchange of research findings. The winner of the inaugural award is Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the internet. CIS partnered with Privacy International and Society in Action Group which has produced outputs in banking, telecommunications, consumer rights, media law, sexual minorities, etc., and submitted seven open letters to Parliamentary Finance Committee on UID covering several aspects, feedbacks on NIA Bill, and IT Rules.

Peer Review

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen by Nishant Shah, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1.
Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps by Nishant Shah, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1.

Book Review

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer “In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding.”
Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography was published in the Biblio Vol. XV Nos. 11 & 12, November- December 2011

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Spy in the Web The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy, Nishant Shah, Indian Express, 18 December 2011.
What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online, Nishant Shah, GQ India.
Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities: Nishant Shah responds to Michael Edwards through this blog post published in the Broker on 27 December 2011.

Interview

An Interview with Dr. Ann Cavoukian: Elonnai Hickok interviews Dr. Ann Cavoukian, Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, Canada.
When the digital spills into the physical: Nishant Shah tells us why flash mobs are an interesting sign of our times, and not just a passing fad. MidDay published this interview in their newspaper on 18 December 2011.

Video

Phishing Attacks on the Rise: Sunil Abraham was on the TV Channel News 9 on 2 December 2011 speaking about two visual cues to distinguish between the fake and the real websites.

Media Coverage

India’s dreams of web censorship, Financial Time's beyondbrics, 6 December 2011, Sunil Abraham was quoted in this post.
Did He, Didn’t He by Rahul Bhatia, Open Magazine (issue: 7-14 December 2011)
Much at stake for tech sector in UID project by Pranav Nambiar, Economic Times, 12 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
On the net, red herring by Javed Anwer, The Times of India, 4 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
Twitter, Facebook take the lead in blogosphere as blog searches fall by half by Ameya Chumbhale, Economic Times, 17 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this article.

Event Report

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Zainab Bawa, Ayisha Abraham, Ward Smith and Marek Tuszinsky gave a talk. Videos of the event are now online.

Upcoming Events

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the "Right to Privacy Bill": Privacy India in partnership with International Development Research Centre, Canada, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, the Godrej Culture Lab, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore is organising "Privacy Matters", a public conference at IIT, Bombay on 21 January 2012.

The High Level Privacy Conclave: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon and Privacy International, UK is organizing the High Level Privacy Conclave at the Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens in New Delhi on Friday, 3 February 2012.

All India Privacy Symposium: Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, Privacy International, UK and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is organizing the All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre, New Delhi on Saturday, 4 February 2012.

Event Organised

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 Dec 2011, Kavita Philip gave a talk.

Special Section on Freedom of Expression

We usually cover Freedom of Expression under Internet Governance. However, this month there has been much discussion regarding the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal’s proposal for pro-active censorship of social media. This special section covers reportage and original content from CIS:

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Invisible Censorship: How the Government Censors Without Being Seen by Pranesh Prakash: The Indian government wants to censor the Internet without being seen to be censoring the Internet. The article was translated into Marathi and featured in Lokmat, 18 December 2011.
US Clampdown Worse than the Great Firewall by Sunil Abraham: If you thought China’s Internet censorship was evil, think again. American moves to clean up the Web could hurt global surfers. Sunil Abraham wrote this article in Tehelka, Volume 8, Issue 50, 17 December 2011.
That’s the Unkindest Cut, Mr. Sibal by Sunil Abraham: There’s Kolaveri-di on the Internet over Kapil Sibal’s diktat to social media sites to prescreen users’ posts. That diktat goes far beyond the restrictions placed on our freedom of expression by the IT Act. But, says Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society, India is not going to be silenced online. Deccan Chronicle, 11 December 2011.

Blog Posts

Online Pre-Censorship is Harmful and Impractical by Pranesh Prakash: The Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Mr. Kapil Sibal wants Internet intermediaries to pre-censor content uploaded by their users. Pranesh Prakash takes issue with this and explains why this is a problem, even if the government's heart is in the right place.
Press Coverage of Online Censorship Row: We are maintaining a rolling blog with press references to the row created by the proposal by the Union Minister for Communications and Information Technology to pre-screen user-generated Internet content.

Radio Broadcast

Social media sites refuse Indian censorship request: Sunil Abraham spoke to Radio Australia. Follow the broadcast here

Live Chat

Is the govt bid to regulate content on the Internet a good thing?: Pranesh Prakash answered questions freedom of expression vis-a-vis objectionable content live on CNN-IBN's chat feature, 7 December 2011.

Media Coverage

Caught in the Web: “As it is the status of freedom of speech in India is in a bad shape. Sibal's new rules will only make it worse.”— Sunil Abraham in Hindu Business Line, 13 December 2011.

Online gag: Existing rules give little freedom: “Our criticism is of the policy and not of the websites and Internet entities that are forced to err on the side of caution when faced by such notices.” — Sunil Abraham in the Times of India, 9 December 2011.
Facebook, Google tell India they won’t screen for derogatory content: “Researchers sent mock take-down notices to seven sites, complaining about their content... six sites immediately deleted content. They did not even verify the validity of our flawed complaint. They over-complied.” — Sunil Abraham in Washington Post, 6 December 2011.
‘Any Normal Human Being Would Be Offended’: “Indian law seems to state that it has global jurisdiction but that is not really true. An Indian court might give an order that is unenforceable in the United States or anywhere else.” — Sunil Abraham in the New York Times, 6 December 2011.
IT Inc oppose Sibal’s ‘great’ firewall proposal: “You wouldn’t want to end up with a situation where you are denied access to, say, the website of the University of Sussex because the address contains the word ‘sex’.” — Nishant Shah in Indian Express, 7 December 2011.
Online @ India: “I haven't yet heard of anybody in India going on a rampage because somebody in Pakistan started an 'India hate' page.” — Nishant Shah in the Hindustan Times, 10 December 2011.
How ‘private-censorship’ is making online content disappear, quietly: “Google’s self-reported compliance rate of 51 per cent shows that they are probably over-stepping the law in order to appease the Indian government’s requests.” — Pranesh Prakash in FirstPost, 15 December 2011.
Kapil Sibal to sterilise Net but undercover sting shows 6 of 7 websites already trigger-happy to censor under ‘chilling’ IT Act, Legally India, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this blog post.
‘Chilling’ Impact of India’s April Internet Rules by Heather Simmons, New York Times, 7 December 2011.
Govt wants to scrub the Internet clean, Livemint, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India's Techies Angered Over Internet Censorship Plan, NPR, 20 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash was quoted in this blog post.
Internet, social media access should not be blocked: Ban, Oman Tribune, 10 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
India entering the Minority Report age?, ioL scietech. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this.
Los internautas indios se oponen a la censura a través de la Red, Diario de Navarra, 7 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the Spanish newspaper.
Technological beasts like Facebook, Orkut, YouTube & Google impossible to control by Sunanda Poduwal & Kamya Jaiswal, Economic Times, 11 December 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in the article.
Google V/s Kapil Sibal by Sundeep Dougal in Outlook, 8 December 2011. Pranesh Prakash's work at CIS has been extensively quoted in this blog post.
India bid to censor Internet draws flak Phil Hazlewood spoke to Sunil Abraham and published this article for AFP. France 24, Khaleej Times, Physorg.com, TimesLive, Bangkok Post, Yahoo News, MSN News, Emirates 24/7, Business Live and Jakarta Globe also carried the news on their websites, 9 December 2011.

Videos

Censorship — A Death Knell for Freedom of Expression Online: On 8 December 2011, NDTV aired an interesting discussion on internet censorship. Shashi Tharoor, Soli Sorabjee, Shekhar Kapoor, Ken Ghosh and Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion with NDTV's Sonia Singh.
FTN: Should social networking sites be censored?: Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal met the representatives of Facebook, Google and others seeking to device a screening mechanism. Sunil Abraham was on CNN-IBN from 10.00 p.m. to 10.30 p.m. speaking about freedom of expression in India.
Debate: Online content row-1: Sunil Abraham was on Times Now from 9.05 p.m. to 9.45 p.m. on 6 December 2011 speaking about freedom of expression in India.

Event Organised

Free Speech Online in India under Attack? A Panel Discussion, 21 December 2011. Achal Prabhala, Anja Kovacs, Lawrence Liang and Sunil Abraham gave lectures.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. In this connection, Shyam Ponappa continues to write his monthly column for the Business Standard.

Newspaper Article

Healing self-inflicted wounds by Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, 1 December 2011: A spate of dysfunctional actions and retrograde developments has led to an unimaginable mess for India. Can the damage to growth prospects be undone? Does it need to be? If so, how?

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2011-bulletin

December 2010 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-07T11:28:02Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! It gives us immense pleasure to present regular updates on the progress of our research on the mainstream Internet media. In this issue of we bring our latest project updates, news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs arising from these projects are now online for public review:

Pornography & the Law
This monograph attempts to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/f1sQsi

Re:wiring Bodies
Dr. Asha Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Deadline for review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/gYCP1C

The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem — An Inquiry into Technology and Governance
The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour. The deadline for peer review expires on 15 Jan 2011.
http://bit.ly/iiYJp1

New Blog Entries

Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities

Queer Histories of the Internet

A Detour: The Internet and Forms of Narration: A Short Note

Digital Natives

CIS has interest in developing Digital Identities as a core research area and looks at practices, policies and scholarships in the field to explore relationships between Internet, technology and identity.

Columns on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following articles were published in the Indian Express recently:

Make a Wish [published on 19 December 2010]
Play Station [published on 5 December 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Publication

Position papers from the Thinkathon conference held at Hague from 6 to 8 December have been published:

Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

National Award

Nirmita Narasimhan got a National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India on 3 December 2010. The award was presented by Smt. Pratibha Patil, President of India under the Role Model category. The event was telecast live on Doordarshan.

Nirmita Narasimhan wins National Award

Conference Report

An international conference on Enabling Access to Education through ICT was held in New Delhi from 27 to 29 October 2010. The full report of the conference is published online:

Enabling Access to Education through ICT - Conference Report

New Blog Entries

Intellectual Property

Copyright, patents and trademarks are the most important components on the Internet. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entries

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software, its latest involvement have yielded these results:

Reports

Event

Wikipedia Meetup in Bangalore, This time in TERI

Privacy

CIS is doing a couple of projects, one Privacy in Asia which is supported by Privacy International, UK and the other on Privacy and Identity which is funded by Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar.

New Blog Entries

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this.

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Take 'Model T' for Telecom

News & Media Coverage

An online community platform for people with different needs (Sify News, 12 December 2010)

Self-regulation in media and society meet to gain legal perspectives (Indiantelevision.com, 13 December 2010)

This Is All India Radia (Outlook, 6 December 2010)

'Pakistan' hackers target India's top police agency (Google News, 4 December 2010)

Intellectual Property Rights as seen in a graphic novel (TimeOut Bengaluru, 1 December 2010)

The Niira Radia Tapes: Scrutinizing the Snoopers (The Wall Street Journal, 29 November 2010)

Mobile banking set to get a boost from IMPS (The Hindu, 28 November 2010)

UID elicits mixed response (Deccan Herald, 23 November 2010)

Time to bury e-mail? (DNA, 21 November 2010)

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2010-bulletin

Debating Ethics: Dignity and Respect in Data Driven Life

Admin — 2018-11-07T03:03:25Z

Elonnai Hickok was a speaker in the panel "Move Slower and Fix Things" which was part of the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners. The event was organized by International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC) from October 22 - 26, 2018 in Brussels. Elonnai participated in the event on October 24 and 25, 2018.

Click to read about the Programme here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/debating-ethics-dignity-and-respect-in-data-driven-life

Debate: Online content row-1

praskrishna — 2011-12-07T11:06:19Z

In a debate moderated by TIMES NOW's Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami, panelists Chandan Mitra, Editor-in-Chief, 'The Pioneer' & MP, BJP; Sabeer Bhatia, Co-founder, Hotmail; Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society; Ankit Fadia, Ethical Hacker; Suhel Seth, Managing Partner Counselage; Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, Cyber Media and Rajesh Charia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India discuss the issue if the Government should make clear definition of what is objectionable to internet/social media companies and draw a clear distinction between communally incitable material and political censorship.

Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal today (Dec 6) vowed to stop offensive and defamatory content on internet sites as a controversy raged over government's move to monitor content in cyber space. Maintaining that the government does not want to interfere with the freedom of the press, he said if the social networking sites are not willing to cooperate with the government on stopping incendiary material "then it is the duty of the government to think of steps that we need." Sibal's hurriedly-called press conference came against backdrop of government's meetings with the officials from Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo over last few weeks after offensive material particularly against Congress leader Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was put on the net. He said his request for cooperation from them fell on "deaf ears" and "we will not allow intermediaries to say that the throw up our hands and we cannot do anything about it."

Facebook in its reaction said it will cooperate in removing any content that violates its terms which are designed to keep material that is hateful, threatening, incites violence or contains nudity off the service. Google said it will abide by local law and take any material if it violates its policies but asserted that it will not remove any content just because it is controversial. Google said that when content is illegal it abides by local law and removes it. And even where the content is legal but violates "our terms and conditions, we take that down too, once we have been notified." However, it says, when content is legal and does not violate its policies, it will not remove just because it is controversial.

Even as Sibal defended the government's move, criticism poured in the cyber space that India should not emulate countries like China in attempting to gag freedom of expression. However, the Minister got support from Shashi Tharoor, Congress MP, who is popular in cyber world. "Have to say I support Kapil Sibal on the examples he gave me: deeply offensive material about religions & communities that could incite riots," Tharoor tweeted. But his political rivals and MPs Varun Gandhi and Jayant Choudhary differed. Gandhi said Internet is the only truly democratic medium free of "vested interests, media owners & paid-off journos. Can see why Sibal wants to gag it," he said. Chaudhary said "Censorship of the internet - Forget the desirability issue for a minute, IS IT EVEN POSSIBLE??!!!"

Sunil Abraham was on Times Now from 9.05 p.m. to 9.45 p.m. on December 6, 2011 speaking about freedom of expression in India.

See the debate on Times Now

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/online-content-row

Debate: Five Aadhaar Myths that Don’t Stand Up to Scrutiny

praskrishna — 2016-04-01T15:48:17Z

We need to reboot the Aadhaar debate by asking why we want to create a centralised biometric database of Indian residents in the first place.

The article by Reetika Khera was published in the Wire on March 23, 2016.

A recent article, ‘Identification simplified, myths busted’, by Piyush Peshwani and Bhuwan Joshi (hereafter, Peshwani & Joshi) makes some questionable claims about the UID project. Peshwani & Joshi’s strategy appears to be to ignore those questions to which they do not have an answer (e.g., that Aadhaar is mostly redundant as far as NREGA, PDS, etc., are concerned). For others, they cherry-pick ‘facts’ without acknowledging the debates surrounding those facts. Here is a selection.

#1: To get Aadhaar, you need a Proof of ID (PoID) and Proof of address (PoA)

Peshwani & Joshi: “For many, Aadhaar is perhaps the first document of their existence – a robust proof of their identity and address that can be verified online. No more closed doors for them!”

Peshwani & Joshi: “The Demographic Data Standards and Verification Procedures committee prescribes a list of valid 18 proof of identity and 33 valid proof of address documents for getting an Aadhaar.”

Fact: In fact, 99.97% of those who have Aadhaar, used PoID and PoA to get it. For those who have neither, there is an “introducer system”, but according to a reply to an RTI request, only 0.03% of those who have the Aadhaar number used this route.

As far as closed doors are concerned, Aadhaar does not guarantee any benefits: work through NREGA, widow or old-age pensions or PDS rations. There are separate eligibility conditions for those programmes which continue to apply.

#2 On costs

Peshwani & Joshi: “Does it justify the cost? Yes, absolutely, according to the World Bank, which said the initiative is estimated to be saving the Indian government about $1 billion annually by thwarting corruption, even as it underlined that digital technologies promote inclusion, efficiency and innovation.”

Fact: Savings due to the use of Aadhaar have been disputed. The government has claimed it has saved Rs. 14,672 crore on LPG subsidies due to Aadhaar while they are likely lower – by a factor of 100 (see Business Standard or Wall Street Journal).

Peshwani & Joshi: “Even before the World Bank’s endorsement of Aadhaar, the Delhi-based National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP) conducted a detailed cost-analysis study on Aadhaar in 2012… the study found that the Aadhaar project would yield an internal rate of return in real terms of 52.85% to the government.”

Fact: The NIPFP cost-benefit was based on unrealistic assumptions – e.g., estimates of leakages that Aadhaar could plug were available for only two out of seven schemes; for the rest, they assumed leakage rates which are termed ‘conservative’, but are actually not.

In their response, the NIPFP team admitted that “a full-fledged cost benefit analysis of Aadhaar is difficult” because “many gains from Aadhaar are difficult to quantify because they are intangible” and, “even if in specific schemes there may be tangible benefits, the information available on those schemes does not permit a precise quantification of those benefits.”

They went on to say that “The study has steered away from relying exclusively on analyses of isolated and small sample sets”. What evidence did the NIPFP study rely on? “For ASHAs, Janani Suraksha Yojana and scholarships, no analysis, large or small has been used. For the Indira Awaas Yojana, the three analyses relied on exclusively are a Times of India news report, a press release based on a discussion in Parliament and a “Scheme Brief” by the Institute for Financial Management and Research (IFMR). Interestingly, the corruption estimate in the IFMR brief cross-refers to the Times of India article (apart from a CAG report)!” (Khera, 2013)

#3 De-duplication

Peshwani & Joshi: “Aadhaar means no fake, ghost or duplicate beneficiaries. Double-dipping will become more and more difficult with Aadhaar, a number that is well de-duplicated with the use of biometrics.”

Fact: De-duplication is one possible contribution of Aadhaar – but that needs biometrics, not a centralised biometric database. Local biometrics (used extensively in Andhra Pradesh before UID) mean that biometric data is stored by the concerned government department or on the local e-POS machine’s memory chip. It has the advantage that connectivity is not required (you are authenticated by the machine), errors and corrections can be correctly locally, making it more practical. The distinction between a local and centralised database is important (see #5 below).

Further, no one has a reliable estimate of the duplication problem. Two government estimates of duplicates exist: the Dhande committee for LPG (2%) and in NREGA job cards from the Government of Andhra Pradesh (also 2%).

#4 Exclusion

Peshwani & Joshi: “As far as exclusion in delivery of other services due to biometric authentication accuracy is concerned, it is important to go beyond scratching the surface.”

Fact: When the PDS was integrated with Aadhaar: “The Andhra Pradesh Food and Civil Supplies Corporation found that…nearly one-fifth ration card holders did not buy their ration.” Further, “When the government delved deeper in the issue, it was found that out of the 790 cases interviewed for the study, 400 reported exclusion. Out of the excluded cases, 290 were due to fingerprint mismatch and 93 were because of Aadhaar card mismatch. The remaining 17 cases were due to failure of E-PoS.” More here.

Moreover, Peshwani & Joshi pick one definition of ‘exclusion’ (due to biometric failure) when in fact, exclusion has a broader meaning. For instance, “In Chitradurga (Karnataka), Rs.100-150 million in wages from 2014-15 were held up for a year. When payments were being processed, their job cards could not be traced in NREGAsoft. Upon enquiry, the district administration learnt field staff had deleted them to achieve ‘100% Aadhaar-seeding’.”

#5 Profiling and privacy violations

Peshwani & Joshi: “A prominent criticism of Aadhaar is that it ‘profiles’ people.” …“Most of us have one or more identity/address documents, such as a passport, ration card, PAN card, driving licence, vehicle registration documents or a voter ID card. The government departments managing these already have our data. Aadhaar is no different. We give our data to banks, to insurance companies and to telecom companies for accounts, policies and mobile connections.”

Fact: That’s like saying BJP can be more corrupt because the Congress was corrupt. Instead we need to engage more seriously with the work of Sunil Abraham, Amber Sinha and others at the Centre of Internet and Society. There are crucial differences between Aadhaar and Social Security Number in the US, see this. Malavika Jayaram listed the UID project among a slew of “big brother” projects facilitating mass surveillance in India.

Conclusion

The debate on UID tends to begin with the premise that Aadhaar is necessary for ‘good governance’. Those claims of the UIDAI have long been demolished. In a nutshell, Aadhaar cannot help identify the poor, its possession does not guarantee inclusion into government social welfare (go to #1). It cannot reduce PDS or NREGA corruption as claimed in their early documents. Thankfully, PDS–NREGA corruption has been on the decline without Aadhaar – more needs to be done. (More details? Try this and this.)

Bihar shows how much corruption in the PDS can be reduced without Aadhaar. Credit: Reetika Khera

Aadhaar is not required for portability of benefits or for cash transfers. Cash transfers need bank accounts. To get a bank account, you need a proof of ID and a proof of address (go to #1). Aadhaar can help de-duplicate, but so can local biometrics (go to #3). We need to “reboot” the Aadhaar debate, starting on the right terms – why exactly do we need to create a centralised biometric database of Indian residents?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-march-23-2016-reetika-khera-debate-five-aadhaar-myths-that-dont-stand-up-to-scrutiny

Debate over #Aadhaar Turns Nasty as Critics Accuse Supporters of Online Trolling

praskrishna — 2017-06-07T13:09:10Z

Internet Freedom Foundation’s Kiran Jonnalagadda has alleged that iSPIRT and its co-founder Sharad Sharma set up fake Twitter profiles to harass, intimidate Aadhaar critics.

The article by Ajoy Ashirwad Mahaprahasta was published in the Wire on May 19, 2017.

As bizarre as this may sound, one of the founders of the Indian Software Products Industry Round Table (iSPIRT) – an influential think-tank closely associated with the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) – Sharad Sharma, is battling allegations of trolling anti-Aadhar campaigners through fake Twitter profiles.

Kiran Jonnalagadda, one of the founders of Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF), has alleged that a number of fake profiles started to troll him online earlier this month in response to his criticism of Aadhar on Twitter. Surprisingly, he said, one of the profiles –@confident_India – which trolled him was apparently operated by Sharma, considered highly influential within the IT and start-up industry and a governing council member of iSPIRT.

What is iSPIRT?

In 2013, a group of volunteers working with NASSCOM founded iSPIRT to represent the software products industry independently. It is widely known that many of these same volunteers also helped the UIDAI develop much of the initial Aadhaar infrastructure and ecosystem. According to Forbes India, iSPIRT helps Indian software product companies “draft and take policy proposals to government officials; create reusable ‘playbooks’ from successful companies that can be applied by others; and create ‘self-help communities’.” It aims to facilitate Indian software product companies, which build affordable and innovative technologies, get a footprint in sectors like health, education, infrastructure and create conditions so that they get an equal platform to compete with big multinationals.

In this mission, iSPIRT believes that Aadhaar-based technologies, which Indian software product companies may create, could help the Indian software product industry gain an advantage over multinationals, which may be skeptical about using Aadhaar. In other words, iSPIRT, one of the biggest advocates of Aadhaar, sees a commercial advantage to the increasing use of Aadhaar for many of the entrepreneurs associated with the Round Table. To this end, iSPIRT runs two initiatives – ProductNation and IndiaStack, a collection of open APIs for technology infrastructure projects like UPI and Aadhaar.

While the mission may sound fine, many of the Aadhaar advocates within iSPIRT have had to face questions from civil society, most of which have to do with the suspicion that Aadhaar could compromise online privacy. This, over the past few months, has led to heated social media battles between iSPIRT and anti-Aadhaar campaigners.

However, the debate took a darker turn when Jonnalagadda uploaded a video showing that the @Confident_India Twitter handle could be traced back to Sharma’s personal mobile phone number on Twitter. Sharma, has since then, apparently changed his number.

“It was only when I started to grow suspicious of the handle that I thought of using Sharma’s phone number to verify the account,” Jonnalagadda tells The Wire.

In an article – “Inside the mind of India’s chief tech stack evangelist” – where he narrates the events, he says “a flurry of newly created Twitter trolls accounts began heckling me about Aadhaar”.

Around 10 such handles started making unprovoked attacks on Jonnalagadda and another founder of IFF, Nikhil Pahwa, accusing them of being guided by “greed, profit, and deceit” for being in the “#AntiAadhaar brigade.”

As the argument continued, @confident_India called Jonnalgadda “pretentious” mouthing “highfalutin stuff” and “techno-babble”.

“All these did not perturb me as it was a part of routine arguments,” says Jonnalagadda.

However, in what he calls a “lightbulb moment”, he had the first inkling that Sharma could be operating the account of @confident_India through this thread:

“Sharad Sharma’s original account doesn’t follow any of these people on the thread. The conversation would not have shown on his timeline. Yet both @confident_India and Sharad Sharma made the same argument,” says Jonnalagadda.

Then, he says, Sharma gave it out. A question addressed to Sharad Sharma ended up being answered by @confident_India.

@Confident_India also went on a tirade against the IFF fellows and called them “JNUtype”, “ISISstooge” or belonging to Lutyens Delhi, insinuating that the IFF fellows are terrorists or largely belong to a certain social elite category of people.

When this prompted Jonnalagadda to verify the account with Sharma’s number, it matched. He later posted the video on his account.

An email from The Wire to Sharad Sharma remained unanswered at the time of writing.

However, soon after this alleged expose kicked off a Twitter war between the two groups, Sharad responded with a reply to Nikhil Pahwa’s tweet.

iSPIRT also responded in various online forums. “Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT, named in these allegations is in the US for a medical emergency in his family. As of this morning, Eastern Standard Time, Sharad has categorically denied these allegations. We will further investigate the confusion around the alleged link of mobile number and clarify all outstanding questions. For the moment, we are prioritising the well-being of Sharad and his family,” says the organisation’s response.

“We want to categorically state that the allegations against iSPIRT coordinating and/or promoting any troll campaign are false and the evidence presented is a deliberate misreading of our intent to engage with those speaking against India Stack” it added.

Interestingly, however, what has emerged out of the controversy is another allegation by the IFF that iSPIRT had made trolling part of its policy to counter Aadhaar’s “detractors.”

At a fellows meeting earlier this year in February, iSPIRT charted out a “Detractors Matrix” in which they categorised the anti-Aadhar campaigners into four categories, namely “misinformed, fearful, and engaging”, “informed, fearful and engaging”, “misinformed and trolling” and lastly, “informed yet trolling”. In an internal iSPIRT presentation, Reetika Khera, IIT professor and a renowned economist, and Nikhil Pahwa, IFF’s co-founder were shown as belonging to the last two categories.

To counter Aadhaar critics on online platforms, iSPIRT volunteers intended to group themselves into “archers” and “swordsmen” who would challenge their theories on Twitter and elsewhere.

iSPIRT has acknowledged discussing the “detractor matrix” in its reply to the allegation but dismissed it being equivalent to trolling, as Jonnalagadda alleges. Co-founder of iSPIRT, ThiyagaRajan Maruthavanan, while responding to allegations said that there was no official involvement on behalf of iSPIRT.

CIS allegations

Many of the pro-Aadhaar Twitter trolls, most noticeably Confident_India, have also lashed out at other Internet rights organisations. This includes the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) which last month released a report that claimed that over 100 million Aadhaar numbers were publicly exposed by four government websites. The Confident_India Twitter handle has alleged that CIS has violated foreign funding regulations (under the Foreign Contributions Regulations Act), that they are likely “funded by ISI” and that because of their “advocacy efforts”, the organisation should be shut down.

It should be noted that the Unique Identification Authority of India has also sent a sharp letter to CIS over its report and has suggested that some of the Aadhaar data that the report documented could not have been gotten through legal means.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-may-19-2017-ajoy-ashirwad-mahaprahasta-debate-over-aadhaar-turns-nasty-as-critics-accuse-supporters-of-online-trolling

Debate on Section 66A rages on

praskrishna — 2012-12-10T09:44:31Z

Last week, a reputed BPO in Chennai took down its Facebook page and introduced stricter moderation for posts on its bulletin board.

Vasudha Venugopal's article was published in the Hindu on December 10, 2012. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The measure, an official said, was aimed at avoiding any "callous remark by any employee." "We have discussions on many raging topics here, and we are just making sure the content is clean with no intended defamation."

The need to present only ‘unobjectionable content’ is just one off-shoot of a controversy that has gripped the country after at least five persons were arrested in recent months for posting their views online. But what started as an outcry by a few voices against the IT Act has now turned into a campaign against the constitutional validity of the Act itself. Last week also saw concerted protests to demand the repeal of Section 66A of the IT Act, under which most of the accused were booked. Human chains and protests were conducted in Chennai, Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Guntur, Kakinada, Vijaywada, Visakhapatnam, Pune, Kozhikode and Kannur, among others.

In the past few months, the debate on the use of Section 66A in particular, and the Act in general, has gathered momentum. The arrests of Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra for circulating a cartoon lampooning West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee; cartoonist Aseem Trivedi; businessman Ravi Srinivasan for tweets against Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram’s son Karti Chidambaram; and the two girls in Maharashtra for criticising the bandh after Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray’s death have sparked popular anger.

“Public anger and media attention have been so strong that the government has been forced to retreat, which is a good first step,” says Alagunambi Welkin, president of the Free Software Foundation Tamil Nadu, which organised the protests in Chennai. "The next step would be to plug the loopholes in the IT Act. After all, this same government has declared in various international forums that it is all for promoting openness online."

Activists say that along with the increased pressure on the government, collecting information on cases of the misuse of the Act are the tasks that have to be fulfilled immediately. Human rights activist A. Marx, who has filed a public interest litigation petition against Section 66A, says the selective application of the law is very troubling. From a broader perspective though, this is also an issue of global proportions. Recently, a man in the U.K. was jailed for 18 months after he was found guilty of posting abusive messages on an online memorial. In July this year, a young Moroccan was arrested in Casablanca on the charge of posting “insulting caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed on Facebook.”

As recently as Tuesday, a Shenzen resident was arrested for posting a letter online, accusing a senior village official of corruption, and last week, a man in Kent was arrested for posting an image of a burning poppy on a social network site.

However, Pranesh Prakash, policy director, Centre For Internet And Society, Bangalore, notes that the more problematic parts in India’s laws are ones that result from adaptation. India’s own adaptation of the U.K. law, for instance, considerably increases punishment from six months to three years. However, if it is any consolation, there are voices worldwide being raised on this issue. Till last week, Google’s search page had a message: "Love the free and open Internet? Tell the world’s governments to keep it that way," and a link for comments directed to the Dubai conference, which will see a wide-ranging discussions and key decisions on global internet governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-sci-tech-internet-december-10-2012-vasudha-venugopal-debate-on-section-66a

Debate on Cyber Crime in TV9

praskrishna — 2017-03-28T15:25:40Z

Vidushi Marda took part in a debate on cyber crime which was aired on TV9 on January 13, 2017.

Vidushi spoke about the the definition of "cyber crime" within the IT Act, and also on proportionality of punishment/the best way to deal with such incidents. This programme was aired after a few college websites had been hacked to display false notices from deans, registrars, etc.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/debate-on-cyber-crime-in-tv9

Death By WhatsApp

Admin — 2018-06-25T15:47:41Z

The fatal messages were both in text and in audio. They were in Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Hindi, Assamese and Gujarati among others.

This was published by News18.com on June 25, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

Guys please be on high alert10:24 PM

Three kids were kidnapped from my friend’s area this morning.. There were 10 guys giving biscuits and people from that area have caught all 10 n 5 more based on their info...10:24 PM

Cops arrived at scene and informed that 400 people have landed in Hyderabad (or Bangalore or Chennai or KarbiAnglong or Singhbhum or any other place) for child trafficking. Check my next video and repost. Parents pls be on high alert.10:25 PM

The Snowball Effect

No one had any idea where the messages originated from or who was the original sender. But when it comes to the safety of one’s children, these questions become irrelevant.

Maybe, if someone had stopped to ask these questions, this fake WhatsApp message wouldn’t have led to 22 murders in one year. These 22 ‘outsiders’ were lynched by mobs on the mere suspicion of being the non-existent ‘child lifters’.

Phony as a three-dollar bill, the message spread like forest fire from Jharkhand to Tamil Nadu and Assam to Gujarat. In each state, it preyed on the raging ‘local versus outsider’ sentiment. It started doing the rounds of southern states around the time when political discourse was hijacked by the ‘North versus South’ debate.

It might be easy now to scoff at those who believed and further shared the fake message, but hindsight is always a perfect 20/20.

In fact, according to a research by University of Warwick, 40% of fake news cannot be spotted by average educated adults. Even if they do feel something is amiss, only 45% adults can place their finger on what exposes the news as fake.

Social media and internet penetration have only aggravated the problem in India, where the written word is rarely doubted.

Social media and internet penetration have only aggravated the problem in India, where the written word is rarely doubted.

In the last four years, social media usage in the country has gone up by 150% with an 83% increase in smartphone ownership. Such proliferation and the availability of competitive data plans have ensured digital intrusion in areas where people have had no exposure to the concept of fake news or digital privacy.

Caveat emptor does not apply in this case, says Sunil Abraham, the Executive Director of Bangalore-based research organisation Centre for Internet and Society.

A Timeline of Deaths

CHAPTER 1

The Propaganda Machine

WhatsApp has unfortunately become a fertile breeding ground for parasites that prey on fear. At present, it has 200 million active users. These users are potential victims of fake news given the complex form of anonymity that WhatsApp offers. It is mainly to arrest the fake news propaganda that the first step in violence-hit areas is to suspend internet services.

In this case, too, the original culprits took cover in this anonymity and experts believe they may never be unmasked. While Facebook and other social media websites are under pressure to address the menace, an inter-personal software, such as WhatsApp, skirts the scanner.

“Those who are passing the rumours cannot be traced or haven’t been traced purely because they are on WhatsApp groups. My guess is that they would have started it (the rumours) on WhatsApp because it is difficult to trace. Once it starts, it (the message) makes its way to everywhere. Somebody gets it on WhatsApp, they put it on their Facebook profile or forward to other WhatsApp users. It goes across multiple platforms. It is not limited to one platform,” says Alt News co-founder Pratik Sinha.

Those who are passing the rumours cannot be traced or haven’t been traced purely because they are on WhatsApp groups

Given its penetration, WhatsApp has emerged as a cheap medium to propagate hate.

Police officials investigating the murder of senior journalist and Left-leaning thinker Gauri Lankesh in Bengaluru were surprised to find out that a key suspect was an ‘admin’ for hundreds of groups.

KT Naveen Kumar, a college dropout, floated his outfit ‘Hindu Yuva Sena’ in Mandya near Bengaluru three years ago. The Hindutva activist confessed to the police that he created several WhatsApp groups — Hindu Yuva Sena, Jago Hindu Maddur, Bajrang Maddur and Kaveri Boys among others — to propagate his ‘Save Hinduism’ agenda.

Once you create a WhatsApp group and add ‘participants’, you are free to make others the ‘admin’, who in turn can add scores of people to the group. There is no known cap to the number of participants in a WhatsApp group.

How To Spot Fake News

CHAPTER 2

Jharkhand

The fake message on ‘child lifters’ added fuel to fire in Jharkhand, which has been plagued by child abductions and kidnappings for years. Young girls from the state have been known to be abducted and forced into modern-day slavery in other states.

Villagers, who had never heard of the concept of fake news, bought into the rumours. And since a photo can say a 1,000 fake words as well, graphic images freely available on the internet were used alongside the message. The propaganda did the trick and aroused murderous rage among the local tribal population.

At least nine people were killed in separate incidents over as many days in Singhbhum district. Angry mobs beat and hacked the victims to death, assuming they were saving their young ones from ‘child lifting’ gangs that were rumoured to be abducting children for organ trade.

The death toll would have been higher had protest marches against the fake news and the killings not been held in cities like Jamshedpur. While these protests did not get the police to act against hate mongers on social media, the uproar publicised the fact that the message was a fake one.

Over the next few days, alleged ‘child lifters’ were caught in other villages, but were duly handed over to the police.

The disinformation campaign died a natural death in Jharkhand, but moved to a new hunting ground.

CHAPTER 3

Tamil Nadu

More than 2,000 km from Jharkhand, the message landed in Tamil Nadu with an additional detail — be wary of ‘North India people’. It warned of a gang of 400 ‘North Indians’ out to lure children for organ trade. These people, the message added, may try to gain entry inside homes on the pretext of being repair men or hawkers. Again, the images of mutilated bodies did the trick.

No one stopped to think whether a ‘gang of 400 outsiders’ could travel undetected. No one called the 100 helpline to confirm the rumour with the police. The mere ‘police-arrived-at-the-scene’ was enough to convince people of its authenticity.

A man in Thiruvalluvar, north of Chennai, became the state’s first victim of the fake news. A mob beat him mercilessly and hung him from a bridge in Pulicat on May 10.

The mob didn’t even give her a chance to be heard.

The second lynching came in less than 24 hours. This time the victim was an elderly woman identified as Rukmani in the temple town of Thiruvannamalai. She was returning from a temple visit with her relatives when they stopped their car at a village. Rukmani was handing out ‘foreign chocolates’ to local children when word spread that a woman was ‘luring’ kids with sweets.

“The mob didn’t even give her a chance to be heard. Giving out chocolates to children doesn’t make you a child trafficker. I’m scared to even step out after this incident,” says a relative who was in the car with Rukmani and was grievously injured.

Police officials rounded up at least 30 people and charged them with murder.

CHAPTER 4

Andhra Pradesh & Telangana

The mob madness spread to Andhra Pradesh and Telangana next, again preying on anti-migrant sentiment. The first attack was reported mid-May when 12 people were suspected to be members of ‘Parthi’ gang, a group notorious for dacoity in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra.

A couple of days later, a mob beat up two beggars in Vishakhapatnam, killing one of them.

Another horrific attack unfolded in Hyderabad where a transgender was stoned to death by a mob of 200. The victim had travelled from Mahabubnagar district with three others to seek alms in the holy month of Ramzan.

Soon, the fake news reached other districts. A man visiting a relative in Nizamabad was killed when he failed to give ‘satisfactory’ explanation to the mob about his presence there.

A murder in Yadadri district of Telangana, an attack on nine people in Vikarabad district and an assault on a woman at the Guntur railway station followed within days.

CHAPTER 5

Karnataka

The mob mentality fuelled by the fake news campaign reached Karnataka, where the ‘local versus outsider’ debate had reached fever pitch during election campaigning.

WhatsApp users in Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, started receiving warnings on ‘child lifters’ in Kannada.

“Don’t leave your kids unattended..if you find such traffickers, tie them up and call the cops (sic),” one such message advised.04:24 PM

A 26-year-old construction labourer from Rajasthan, identified as Kalu Ram, who had come to look for work was tied with a rope, dragged through the streets of Chamarajpet in west Bengaluru. Beaten with bats and other household ‘weapons’, he succumbed to his injuries.

According to Additional Commissioner (West) BK Singh, India saw a similar kind of 'madness’ 20 years ago with the ‘Ganesha drinking milk’ rumour, but WhatsApp has taken it to a dangerous new height.

“This hapless man was walking alone. Two persons standing there saw him and started following him to a shop just 100 metres away. Suddenly, a crowd gathered. People brought whatever they could find in their homes — cricket bats, stumps, ropes etc,” Singh says.

“Once a crowd becomes a mob, you cannot control it. Many of them may be meek persons individually, but they are taken in by the presence of the mob. The mob thinks that if they act collectively, police won’t act and they can get away easily,” Singh adds.

People brought whatever they could find in their homes — cricket bats, stumps, ropes etc.

Around 20 people were arrested based on CCTV footage and videos taken by bystanders, who did nothing to help the hapless victim. One of the main accused is 26-year-old Anbu, who has other criminal cases pending against him. Four women and a minor were among those in custody. All of them face murder charges now.

The spread of the fake news in Tamil Nadu may also have led to the violence.

Pension Mohalla in Bakshi Garden where the attack took place has a dominant Tamil population. Some of them could have been aware of the rumours before it made its way to Bengaluru. When the WhatsApp messages started doing the Silicon Valley’s rounds, it may have been perceived as a confirmation of the fake news.

Another person was killed under similar circumstances in Salem. The state witnessed seven more such attacks.

CHAPTER 6

Assam

The latest casualty of the fake news was reported in Assam, again a state which deals with anti-migrant sentiment.

On June 8, two youths from Guwahati were battered to death in Karbi Anglong district on suspicion of being child lifters. Police said Abhijit Nath and Nilutpal Das were on their way to the Kanthe Langshu picnic spot when their vehicle was attacked by a group of men at Panjuri Kachari village, 16 km from Dokmoka town.

Eyewitnesses said the two boys were brutally beaten with bamboo poles and wood, and tortured to death by a mob of allegedly inebriated villagers.

“It happened when some locals informed a group of villagers about two men travelling in a black car with an abducted child. These few villagers were drinking in the roadside dhaba and immediately called upon more people to trace the car and catch them. The mob stopped the car and surrounded the two boys inside. The village elders tried to stop them from beating the boys, but they would not listen,” said a local shopkeeper.

The two boys were brutally beaten with bamboo poles and wood, and tortured to death by a mob of allegedly inebriated villagers.

This incident was yet again preceded by paranoia fuelled by WhatsApp forwards. The messages warned people of 'sopadhora' (child lifters) being on the prowl. Many in Karbi Anglong, one of the most backward areas of the country, took those messages as gospel.

“We have arrested 35 people so far. Some of them are directly involved in the attack, while one has been arrested for posting objectionable content on social media, inciting communal violence soon after the incident took place. There’s no substance to the rumour of ‘sopadhora’ (child lifters) in the area. But it had created a fear psychosis among people here,” says Agarwal.

Death By Whatsapp

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/death-by-whatsapp

Death by Social Media

Admin — 2018-07-10T01:44:15Z

The victims of WhatsApp forwards are outsiders, the political class is silent, the state is helpless. There are clear patterns behind the recent mob lynchings.

The article by Pretika Khanna, Abhiram Ghadyalpatil and Shaswati Das was published in LiveMint on July 9, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The Maharashtra state administration is still trying to come to terms with the shocking lynching on 1 July in Dhule district in northern Maharashtra, where a restive mob of 3,500-plus villagers gathered outside the gram panchayat office in Rainpada village, broke open the locks, and killed five agricultural labourers on the suspicion that they were ‘child-lifters’. There have been 14 incidents of mob lynching and vigilante justice—fuelled by rumours spread on social media—in Maharashtra alone in less than a month since 8 June.

In fact, a police officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity as he is part of the investigating team, says the police machinery was clueless as “no police station in the areas where the mob attacks have occurred has received a formal complaint about kidnappings or children missing before the attacks”. Now, of course, everybody has swung into action. In Maharashtra, at prominent public locations across cities and towns, the state government have put up large boards cautioning people against believing social media rumours.

(Right) an angry mob lynched a hawker on suspicion of being a child-lifter at the Tripura State Rifles camp in Agartala on 29 June. Photo: AFP

Over the last year, there have been a number of deaths fuelled by rumours which spread like lightning via WhatsApp, the messaging platform owned by Facebook Inc. Horrific incidents have been reported from the states of Assam, Tripura, Karnataka, Jharkhand among others. A common rumour—that gangs of children-lifters are out to pick up children—has triggered almost all of these incidents of mob frenzy. Those being targeted include migrants, mentally challenged people, nomadic and denotified tribes and other vulnerable sections of society.

“Over 20 people have been killed. It’s unprecedented not just in India but globally. It is as serious as a breakout of an epidemic. Misinformation has been weaponized to target minorities, individuals, activists…,” says Pratik Sinha co-founder AltNews, a fact-checking website.

Complicating matters is that there are multiple reasons behind this shocking breakdown in law and order. Is the villain of the piece WhatsApp, which has 200 million monthly users, and did it do enough to stop the spread of rumours? Did the all-powerful, all-seeing local administration and police do its best to catch the societal discord before it erupted? What role did an overall, environment play, at a time when society has internalized lynching to such an extent that a Harvard-educated union minister Jayant Sinha recently honoured and garlanded eight people convicted of lynching a coal trader Alimuddin Ansari in Ramgarh, Jharkhand, last June?

Over 20 people have been killed. It’s unprecedented not just in India but globally. It is as serious as a breakout of an epidemic. Misinformation has been weaponized to target minorities, individuals, activists…- Pratik Sinha, co-founder of AltNews, a fact-checking website

Fear of the outsider

Not only have most of the victims been strangers, there are clear patterns behind most mob lynchings in recent times. In 2012, for instance, a rumour that spread like wildfire on social media had the north-eastern people in Bengaluru fleeing the city overnight. “These were not just random rumours, these are targeted. For example, the messages circulated in Bengaluru targeted Hindi-speaking migrants,” said Pranesh Prakash, fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based think tank.

Experts point out that victims are usually outsiders as they are not seen as being rooted in society. “There is a structural marginalization based on caste, class which is usually attributed with such rumours. Invariably the attack is against those who already have a reputation,” said T.K. Oommen, sociologist and professor emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU.

Take the Dhule incident. According to the police official cited earlier, “In Maharashtra particularly there has been a method to this madness against some tribes like the Nath Gosavi tribe, to which the victims in Dhule belonged, and the Phase Pardhis. These communities are routinely identified as of criminal bent and have been on the receiving end much before social media emerged.”

There is a structural marginalization based on caste, class which is usually attributed with such rumours. Invariably the attack is against those who already have a reputation- T.K. Oommen, sociologist and professor emeritus at the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, JNU

Changes in society

“Rumours are not a one-time event. They emerge due to unrest in society. This is usually the situation in a society characterized by fear. The general tendency in society is that they are unreliable. That leads to consequences which are usually bad,” says Oommen.

Even as the Union home ministry has no official record of mob lynching, social media has become the primary catalyst for self-styled cow vigilantes, as well, to bring to book those who have reportedly been indulging in cow slaughter. On 1 April 2017, Pehlu Khan, along with six others, was returning from Jaipur to his village in Nuh, Haryana, carrying cows and calves for the purpose of dairy farming. They were stopped at the Jaipur-Delhi national highway by 200 cow vigilantes, who beat Khan to death.

Since 2014, there have been numerous such incidents of mob violence that have normalized the brutal act. The fact that political leaders have not been openly and quickly condemning such instances sets out a signal to the administration and people at large. All this comes at a time when sociologists and mental health experts point out that there has been a change in the societal set-up. They say that unlike older times, there is no folklore anymore. There is also a breakdown of the traditional society set-up along with a speed up of technology which gives a boost to the spread of such rumours.

Social media has become the primary catalyst for self-styled cow vigilantes, as well, to bring to book those who have reportedly been indulging in cow slaughter

Mental health experts say that people tend to believe messages sent through platforms like WhatsApp as they usually are sent by a trusted source. “As a result, doubts regarding the credibility of the source of the messages tend to get diluted. And therefore, we are inherently more likely to not think of rejecting the content of the message as being false or inauthentic,” said Samir Parikh, director of department of mental health and behavioural sciences at Fortis Healthcare.

The role of WhatsApp

On 8 June, two men, who had gone to Kangthilangso waterfall in Karbi Anglong district in Assam were beaten to death by villagers at Panjuri Kachari on suspicion of being child-lifters.

While the police immediately sprung into action, they are still heavily dependent on the response mechanism of the social media companies. “WhatsApp circulation has increased exponentially and we are now thinking of ways to control the flip side of it. When we are faced with specific cases pertaining to social media we write to the platforms separately, but their response time is long,” said Pallab Bhattacharya, special director general of police (special branch), Assam.

Pranesh Prakash, fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based think tank.

There is no literacy training on the fact that the platform has rumours and misinformation, how to spot them and avoid becoming a source of it
- Pranesh Prakash, fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based think tank

According to Prakash, while WhatsApp keeps reminding users that their messages are encrypted, it does not remind its users to not forward unverified information or misinformation, as is prohibited by its acceptable use policy. The acceptable use policy is available only in English, and there is no user conditioning about what kind of messages aren’t acceptable. “Also, there is no literacy training on the fact that the platform has rumours and misinformation, how to spot them and avoid becoming a source of it,” he added.

For instance, Akash Tomar, superintendant of police-city (Ghaziabad) found it challenging to handle the rumours spread through social media platforms during Dera Sacha Sauda riots that took place not very far away from the state and other similar sensitive incidents. “At one point, WhatsApp can help the police in disseminating important and useful information for citizens but off late we have witnessed that such social media platforms have a potential to trigger riots, lynching and other crimes,” Tomar said.

While WhatsApp says it will take appropriate measures to curtail the spread of fake news , simply shooting the messenger is not going to be enough. These murders have not taken place in a digital vacuum.

pretika.k@livemint.com

Komal Gupta and Neetu Chandra Sharma in New Delhi contributed to this story.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/death-by-social-media

Dear Milind Deora, Prakash Javadekar Deserved The Truth

praskrishna — 2013-09-05T10:38:05Z

Milind Deora, the Minister of State for Communications, Information Technology and Shipping, isn’t your typical politician.

This article by Rohin Dharmakumar was published in Forbesindia Magazine on August 22, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

At just 36, he’s way younger than the average cabinet minister (64) or Member of Parliament (53). He’s also richer (Rs.17.5 crore compared to Rs.5.3 crore for the average M.P.)

He’s got his own website - www.milinddeora.in - which unlike most of his peer’s websites, is fairly well-designed and constantly updated. He’s also an avid user of social networks like Twitter (@milinddeora) and Facebook.

Oh, he’s also a Blues fan and a pretty good guitarist.

In short, he’s the kind of politician or minister many Indians would like to vote for.

And vote they do, in fact. Deora’s won the Mumbai (South) parliamentary constituency two times in a row, garnering nearly twice his next opponent’s votes during the 2009 elections.

Which is why it’s surprising, and saddening, to see Deora trot out a patently false set of answers to how America’s global dragnet of Internet surveillance is affecting the privacy of Indians.

On 16th August Deora responded to a question from Rajya Sabha M.P. and BJP Spokesperson Prakash Javadekar, asking the following:

(a) whether it is a fact that India was the fifth most tracked country by the United States intelligence, particularly on the internet;
(b) if so, the details thereof;
(c) the impact of USA”s surveillance program-Prism and Boundless Information on the country; and
(d) the steps Government intends to take to protect country”s interests and the privacy of its citizens?

Javadekar’s question was sorely needed in light of the near-daily disclosures being made about the scarily omnipresent extent to which the US Government spies on global Internet users through a myriad of ways.

India, as Javadekar rightly pointed out, was indeed the fifth most monitored country under the “Boundless Informant” data mining tool that tracks the NSA’s (the US’ lead communications spy agency) global surveillance efforts. In just March 2013 alone, according to a leaked presentation on the tool, the NSA collected 6.3 billion pieces of information from India. Suffice it to say, the information would have come from Indian citizens, businesses, ministries, bureaucrats and of course, members of Parliament (most of who now use webmail and social network from the likes of Google and Facebook).

The only countries that were spied upon more than us were Iran, Pakistan, Jordan and Egypt. Some sobering company, that!

One would thus expect Deora to be seized of the urgency and concern behind Javadekar’s questions. His answer was:

(a) & (b) In June 2013, Media reports have disclosed that India is the fifth largest target of United States electronic surveillance programmes, in terms of interception of communications on fibre cables and other infrastructure. As per media reports, United States agencies used a number of methods to gather intelligence including intercepting communication on fibre cables and infrastructure, collecting information from servers of global internet and Telecom Service Providers. Such companies include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AOL,Youtube, Paltalk and Skype.

Here we have a member of Parliament asks India’s Minister for Communications & IT about the extent to which Indian citizens and businesses are being spied upon by the US – ostensibly a friendly country – and all the Minister could do was cite newspaper reports?

What about your own investigations Mr.Minister? What is the opinion of your leading spy agencies like the NTRO, R&AW and IB? Are they also relying on newspaper reports?

But wait, Deora does go on to provide a few more answers:

(c) & (d) Government has expressed concerns over reported United States monitoring of internet traffic from India. Concerns with regard to violation of any Indian laws relating to privacy of information of ordinary Indian citizen as well as intrusive data capture deployed against Indian citizens or government infrastructure have been conveyed to the United States. The issue of United States Cyber surveillance activities was discussed during the Indo-US (India United States ) strategic dialogue meeting held in New Delhi on 24.06.2013.

Whew. That was reassuring. We expressed “concerns with regard to violation of any Indian laws relating to privacy of information” to the US during a “strategic dialogue meeting”.

Let me guess what the US side responded: “Sure. We’ll do that. Come back to us when you have a privacy law. Ha ha!”

As Sunil Abraham, the director for the Center for Internet & Society points out in Forbes India, India has no modern and comprehensive privacy law. And the government is working on a new one for only the last three years:

What would an ideal privacy law for India look like? For one, it would protect the rights of all persons, regardless of whether they are citizens or residents. Two, it would define privacy principles. Three, it would establish the office of an independent and autonomous privacy commissioner, who would be sufficiently empowered to investigate and take action against both government and private entities. Four, it would define civil and criminal offences, remedies and penalties. And five, it would have an overriding effect on previous legislation that does not comply with all the privacy principles.

The Justice AP Shah Committee report, released in October 2012, defined the Indian privacy principles as notice, choice and consent, collection limitation, purpose limitation, access and correction, disclosure of information, security, openness and accountability. The report also lists the exemptions and limitations, so that privacy protections do not have a chilling effect on the freedom of expression and transparency enabled by the Right to Information Act.

The Department of Personnel and Training has been working on a privacy bill for the last three years. Two versions of the bill had leaked before the Justice AP Shah Committee was formed. The next version of the bill, hopefully implementing the recommendations of the Justice AP Shah Committee report, is expected in the near future. In a multi-stakeholder-based parallel process, the Centre for Internet and Society (where I work), along with FICCI and DSCI, is holding seven round tables on a civil society draft of the privacy bill and the industry-led efforts on co-regulation.

Which brings me to the final part of Deora’s response to Javadekar:

United States official responded that PRISM dealt only with Meta Data (related to the direction and the flow of the traffic) and only broad patterns of telephony and internet traffic are monitored. United States Officials maintained that data content/content of emails are not accessed or not monitored under these surveillance programmes; therefore, it is not a violation of privacy. It was stated by United States that its agencies need to get separate authorization from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court, if they want to access the content of any of the data intercepted by these surveillance programmes.

Dear Mr.Minister, either you have been lied to by your friendly “United States Official”, or, well…

Firstly, by limiting the answer to only PRISM, which happens to be just one of the NSA’s secret tools for online surveillance, you are willfully or inadvertently narrowing down Javadekar’s question which specifically mentions other tools like Boundless Informant.

Almost all of the big Internet companies revealed to be part of the NSA’s global spying mechanism have also used the same tactic to tailor their denials. I suppose they got the cue from the NSA, which loves using the “Under This Program” dodge to derail specific questions about its secret programs, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Another tried and true technique in the NSA obfuscation playbook is to deny it does one invasive thing or another “under this program.” When it’s later revealed the NSA actually does do the spying it said it didn’t, officials can claim it was just part of another program not referred to in the initial answer.

In case you weren’t aware of the NSA’s obfuscation tactics Mr.Minister, here is another great piece on it from the Slate – “How to Decode the True Meaning of What NSA Officials Say”

Thus when your friendly US official tells you that “only meta data (related to the direction and the flow of the traffic) and only broad patterns of telephony and internet traffic are monitored” under PRISM, not “data content/content of emails”, he or she is technically right.

Because the NSA has other programs that capture all of that. For instance, XKeyscore, which according to leaked presentations, it can capture “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”. This includes emails, visits to websites, web searches and Facebook chats & private messages.

Did you also know, Mr. Minister, that the XKeyscore surveillance program has servers located inside India?

Finally, you make a statement that is patently false. You say that US spy agencies need authorizations from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts (FISC) in order to access the data collected by various surveillance programs.

FISA courts almost always approve any request made to them (they apparently rejected just 11 requests out of 33,900 made by the US government in the last 33 years), so that’s that for oversight.

And in the NSA’s Orwellian world of doublespeak, large scale interception and storage of Internet communications isn’t considered “collected” till such time one of their agents has had a chance to look at it. Which means if you’re reading this post – the NSA’s secret servers over the world and in India can coolly capture that and store it in vast databases for posterity – without it ever registering as a “collection” or requiring any approval from FISA courts.

Fact is, Mr.Minister, we “foreigners” (unless you belong to one of the four other countries that are part of the “Five Eyes” alliance, in which case you’ll be treated with a wee bit more caution) , that is, us, are fair game:

The intelligence data is being gathered under Section 702 of the of the Fisa Amendments Act (FAA), which gives the NSA authority to target without warrant the communications of foreign targets, who must be non-US citizens and outside the US at the point of collection.

The communications of Americans in direct contact with foreign targets can also be collected without a warrant, and the intelligence agencies acknowledge that purely domestic communications can also be inadvertently swept into its databases. That process is known as “incidental collection” in surveillance parlance.

We expected better answers from you Mr.Minister – sorry, expect better.

Alas your recent answers don’t inspire much trust, for instance when you tell us constant surveillance is “good for us” and “will enhance the privacy of citizens”.

Or when you tell us that “Google Hangouts” – a service provided by a company that looms over nearly everything Indians do online – is a better medium to reach out to people than Parliament or Television.

We deserve the truth from you Mr.Minister. Just like Prakash Javadekar.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/forbesindia-august-22-2013-rohin-dharmakumar-dear-milind-deora-prakash-javadekar-deserved-the-truth

Deadline For Linking Bank Accounts With Aadhaar To Be Extended To 31 March

Admin — 2017-12-16T13:24:59Z

The government does away with the existing deadline of 31 December for linking of bank accounts with Aadhaar and PAN

The article by Komal Gupta and Ramya Nair was published in Livemint on December 14, 2017

The government on Wednesday extended the deadline for linking of bank accounts with Aadhaar to 31 March, in line with its submission to the Supreme Court.

The earlier deadline was 31 December.

Bank account holders will have to furnish their 12-digit unique biometric identity number and Permanent account number or PAN by 31 March or within six months of opening the account, whichever is earlier, said a statement from the finance ministry.

This will provide temporary relief to crores of bank account holders who had not linked their bank accounts with the 12-digit unique identity number.

Last week, the income tax department had extended the deadline for linking of Aadhaar with the permanent account number to 31 March from 31 December.

The move comes a day before a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court starts hearing the issue of stay against mandatory linking of Aadhaar with bank accounts and mobile phone numbers.

The statement added that the bank account will cease to be operational in case of failure to furnish Aadhaar and PAN as on 31 March or at the end of six months. The account will become operational again only after the furnishing of documents.

“This is just a gesture from the government, seeking to avoid the court granting an interim stay against the mandatory linkage of Aadhaar with bank accounts. This apparent extension won’t truly help ordinary people, who will continue being harassed through constant messages urging them to provide their Aadhaar number to continue receiving entitlements, services, and for access to one’s own money,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based think tank.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deadline-for-linking-bank-accounts-with-aadhaar-to-be-extended-to-31-march

Dead and Clicking

praskrishna — 2016-03-23T01:42:20Z

A look at the phenomenon of digital memorials; repositories and time capsules of a life even after it's ended in the real world.

The article by Jayanthi Madhukar and Sowmya Rajaram was published by Bangalore Mirror on March 20, 2016. Rohini Lakshane was quoted.

On the first death anniversary of his father-in-law last week, Pradip Mehta (36) decided to show the 120 relatives gathered at his home in Rajkot the digital memoriam he had created through Shradhanjali.com, India's first and only memory portal. As he clicked on the page, the photograph of his father-in-law popped out to the accompaniment of the Mrityunjaya mantra. Curious relatives looked on as he showed them the photo album on the portal where all good moments with the deceased we're captured for eternity. "There were two reasons why I chose this kind of memoriam," he explains. "Instead of paying a fortune on print media for the announcement, this online profile will be up for 30-odd years. And by uploading all the pictures and videos, my wife and I are making sure that he will be 'alive' for our 12-year-old son in the future." Mehta regrets that he grew up with practically no idea of his ancestors. "We don't take efforts to know our lineage at all."

That may not be the case with the millennial generation and the people who follow them. With an entire life online — selfies uploaded to Facebook, tweets, posts, Instagrams of their meals and dubsmashes — leaving behind a legacy is less a matter of choice and more a matter of inevitability. Everybody leaves behind a footprint on the Internet, but some of it can be controlled even after their death. Today, your loved ones have a 'life' beyond their death — on memorialised pages on Facebook, on webpages dedicated to their memory, and even on QR codes on their gravestones that will link to information about them online.

Indeed, the dead may soon outnumber the living, at least in the virtual space. A US statistician has calculated that Facebook's dead will outnumber the living by 2098. And when that is the case, the rules must evolve.

In memoriam

Take the way social norms have evolved in the virtual space. When a death is announced on social media, online friends begin sharing thoughts and comments. Some may not have even met the deceased in the real world but their digital interactions had been extensive enough for them to suffer a sense of grief.

So, how does one mourn a loved one who has piled up an extensive amount of digital possessions? Do they deserve an online memorial? Facebook certainly thinks so. On the social networking website, families can get full access to profiles only if there's documented instruction from the deceased. You can let the site know if a person has passed away, and Facebook will memorialise the account, which means that person's Facebook account now appears with a 'Remembering' above their name. A legacy contact (someone you choose to look after your account if it's memorialised) can then write posts, respond to new friend requests and such. There are many such accounts on the site — take the accounts (now memorialised pages) of actor Sanjit Bedi (of TV show Sanjeevani fame), Sheryl Sandberg's late husband Dave Goldberg and late F1 driver Jules Bianchi. All this, if you don't explicitly ask for your account to be deleted after your death.

In an earlier interview to The Huffington Post, Facebook spokesperson Fred Wolens had said: "When we receive a report that a person on Facebook is deceased, we put the account in a special memorialised state. Certain more sensitive information is removed, and privacy is restricted to friends only. The profile and wall are left up so that friends and loved ones can make posts in remembrance. If we're contacted by a close family member with a request to remove the profile entirely, we will honor that request."

Time capsule

Shradhanjali.com works a little differently. For Vivek Vyas, co-founder of Shradhanjali.com, the idea was born out of empathy rather than business opportunity. He says one particular incident prompted him to offer the memorial service online. He and his friend (now partner) Vimal Popat were eating samosas at a roadside restaurant off Rajkot in 2011. The paper in which the savouries were packed was the obituary page. "It was disturbing to see the photographs of the deceased wrapped around the samosas, oil-stained and later, discarded as rubbish." The friends spoke of having an online memoriam which would be decorous to the memory of the departed.

Back home, the two researched similar sites and to their surprise, found no other site offering such a service in India. "Let's do this," Popat urged Vyas, and the two quit their jobs in an insurance company to start the memorial portal. The site went live in 2011, allowing you to relive memories of your loved ones.

First, one has to register by going online to this B2C website with a simple user interface. Once a payment of Rs 2,700 is made for a 30-year subscription, the subscriber can upload information, photographs and videos about their loved one. They are offered a choice of 10 languages (for friends and relatives to write their condolences) and a selection of music that they wish to be played whenever someone visits the profile page. The content is completely user-driven and once the page goes 'live' the link is sent to all the emails that have been uploaded.

Vyas maintains that their website is gaining traction — there are about 400 paid subscribers, many of them are agencies which partner with print media giving 'packages' to the client — and in spite of not marketing aggressively, the number is growing. "The concept connects with people in a rather intimate manner," he says, "and some of the people to whom I have explained the site have shed copious tears, they are so moved by the concept of memoralising the departed."

In fact, one of the subscribers initially wrote a cheque of Rs 27,000 insisting that the yeoman service needs better cash appreciation.

The founders maintain that their venture is not comparable with Facebook or a blog as Shradhanjali is free of any advertisements and even sends out reminders of birth and death anniversaries. "Besides, the others are not exclusive platforms for memorials," Vyas stresses.

Life, beyond

Clearly, the meaning of the memory of a loved one is different today. It exists beyond photo albums and physical memories of that person's friends and family. Madhu Nataraj, choreographer and dancer, Natya Stem Dance Kampini, discusses what the community page dedicated to her late mother Maya Rao on Facebook means to her. Although the page was made when she was alive, as a way for her students to address her and to talk about her book, after her death in 2014, Nataraj says today it has become a sort of memorial page, where people post their remembrances of her mother.

"She lives on through her art. Every time I dance or step on stage — and I'm sure this is true even of her students — I remember her. This is just another dimension of that remembering," Nataraj says. In another case, the FB page of Dean D'Souza (a close friend of a writer who did not wish to be named), who died in a helicopter crash in 2013, "brings comfort and a smile". He adds, "Friends are constantly posting on it, and his profile picture is changed regularly, reminding us of a happier time. I found it unnerving at first have FB remind me that "It's Dean's birthday", but not anymore over the years."

Nataraj however emphasises that for an artist of her mother's stature, the legacy is through the memory of her art. Of course it feels good when people pay tribute to her online. But a virtual 'memorial' of her mother's life isn't the only legacy she has.

Digital remembering

But the burgeoning number of such services makes it clear that for many others, a virtual repository of their loved one's life is important. Take The Digital Beyond, a site that discusses how to plan digital legacy management — Facebook accounts, email, bank accounts etc — after death.

There are others. In a page straight out of the movie PS I Love You, a service called My Wonderful Life sends posthumous emails to loved ones. Then there's MyDeathSpace.com, which tracks social media profiles of the dead and maintains an extensive message board and Facebook page.

Services such as Living Headstones allow you to emboss a QR code upon a loved one's headstone. Scanning it connects to a website containing information you and friends add about your loved one, such as: an obituary, family heritage and history, photos, comments by friends and relatives and even links to share content on Facebook or Twitter. Another, Quiring Monuments, adds a link to the granite memorial through which smartphones can connect to your loved one's personalised website.

There are those who might raise their eyebrows at such platforms, but Vyas will have none of it. "Just because you have a mandir (a prayer room) at home, the need for temples will not diminish, will it? There is a decorum given to the memory of the dead on our site."

Do we forget?

But there is also a flipside. In the real world there is a period of mourning, people come to offer condolences and then, it is time to move on. Cyberspace may not allow this clean transition from grief and mourning to a semblance of routine. The thing about having such a digital memoriam is that grieving does not really end. This is a setback, according to clinical psychologist Dr Anand A Rao. "Grief has to be suffered immediately otherwise it will become a reaction later which will require clinical help," he says. But reliving the memory each time someone posts a query or shares a memory does not help either. "Ultimately, grief has to stop and loved one's routines have to continue. Typically I would recommend the presence of such a page for about 15 days, no more," he says.

There is also the matter of insincere tributes. As Nataraj says, she was very hurt when people who "hardly knew" her mother had posted selfies captioned: 'Maya didi', "followed by five hearts". "I found that callous," she says. "There are so many so-called obits and condolence messages and everybody wants to claim that familiarity with her that I'm sometimes wary."

But it doesn't look like the digital memorial phenomenon is going away anytime soon. Rohini Lakshane, researcher at the Centre for Internet and Society, agrees with Dr Rao to an extent, saying that getting constant updates could thwart the process of grieving or healing. "But at the same time, I could see how reaching out to a larger community via public updates or photos could give them strength, moral support and empathy," she says. She points out that if a person feels that their online persona or presence is an extension of themselves, it's a perfectly "legitimate wish" to have. "Given the importance attached to details of events that we post online, I suppose the desire to create a time capsule of it will continue to exist.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bangalore-mirror-jayanthi-madhukar-sowmya-rajaram-march-20-2016-dead-and-clicking

De facebook

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T13:41:13Z

Facebook used to be our playground but privacy concerns are now souring that fantasy. Why do we trust a clutch of new corporations with such phenomenal amounts of personal data?

The age of privacy is over, Facebook’s fresh-faced founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared a couple of months back. Social norms have shifted. We are now used to living out loud. “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, ‘Why would I want to put any information on the internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’” he said.

That paranoid past is behind us, claimed Zuckerberg, justifying Facebook’s controversial new decision to fling open the curtains and make maximum visibility the new normal. “In the last five or six years, blogging has taken off in a huge way, and (there are) just all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.

In other words, get over the stage fright. Everyone else is out there over-sharing, arguing, preening, and generally acting out online.

In June last year, Facebook sneaked in a feature called the Everyone update. This makes it much like Twitter, and also allows it to share with and sell information to search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. “Facebook’s privacy changes are relevant as it tries to compete with real-time search on platforms like Twitter. It does give you an option to work around that though I am certain the whole process of setting privacy preferences could be a lot more intuitive,” says Sidharth Rao, digital industry watcher and CEO of internet marketing firm Webchutney.

On the surface, the new Facebook settings are better and much more malleable, if you can figure out how to work them — you can now choose, per post, what you want different sets of people to see. They have eliminated regional networks which would unwittingly expose you to an entire city sometimes (meaning that not everyone who is on the Delhi network, say, has automatic access to your information if you are in Delhi). But on the other hand, the default setting that Facebook recommends is deeply problematic. You, your profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of are all “publicly available information”. Earlier, you could make sure only your friends saw the rest of your friends — now, that option no longer exists as a setting.

Wasn’t privacy once a Facebook fundamental? Unlike the seedier environments of Orkut or Myspace, Facebook grew out of a small Harvard community, expanded to cover other East Coast schools, then conquered companies and countries. In September 2006, Facebook opened registration to anyone with an email address. But it was extremely cautious about how it engineered interaction. In essence, you were meant to socialise with people you already knew.

“It felt safer. It wasn’t about random people sending you scraps and stalking you, like on Orkut or whatever. Facebook reflected my real world. It kept you loosely, comfortably connected to so many people”, says Nomita Sawhney, a young Delhi-based architect. Unlike the threat of cyberstalking, intimidation, and impersonation that stalk less selective networks, Facebook remained clear of what media scholar Danah Boyd calls ‘stranger danger’. Only two years back, Zuckerberg told tech blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick that privacy “is the vector around which Facebook operates”.

I Like To Watch

Why are these changes such a big deal? Zuckerberg’s claim about privacy rings true for most unself-conscious Facebookers. After all, only recently, bra colour status updates were the big buzz on Facebook, ostensibly in support of breast cancer awareness. Now, it’s doppelganger week, where you tell the world what celebrity you most resemble. You can take dippy quizzes, remember birthdays, discuss the news, giggle over pictures. Grim warnings about corporate avarice and government spying sound faintly ridiculous in this pleasant context.

Social networks and blogs have certainly reconfigured privacy. Anyone who’s spent time on Facebook knows the impulse to meander through the pages and pictures of people in that amorphous category called ‘friends of friends’. In just a few years, we have got used to the thought that our lives are externalised and sprawled out for near-strangers to see.

In fact, Facebook is now the largest photo site in the world. When you join Facebook, under its Terms of Service, you give it a “license” (that is, legal permission) to use your content “on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.” It takes some effort to realise how recent all this is, that it’s still a great unfolding experiment, and that we are granting these companies fabulous power.
In his recent book, The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki describes the digital glasshouse: “Peep culture is reality TV, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook. It’s blogs, chat rooms, amateur porn sites, virally spread digital movies of a fat kid pretending to be a Jedi Knight, cell phone photos — posted online — of your drunk friend making out with her ex-boyfriend, and citizen surveillance. Peep is the backbone of Web 2.0 and the engine of corporate and government data mining.”

Web 2.0 was the clunky name for a whole range of liberating personal expression platforms — from Flickr and Youtube to Livejournal and Facebook. These companies provide the space and you bring the party. They encourage you to feel right at home and treat these platforms like your lounge, confessional or salon. Meanwhile, they also collect and refine data about you, and often wield it without your awareness.
In its over-eagerness, Facebook has blundered into several privacy minefields before this—when it first introduced Newsfeed, pushing a steady stream of your friends’ status updates at you, it embarrassed and annoyed many. Boyd compared it to the experience of shouting to be heard at a party, when the music abruptly stops and everyone else can suddenly hear your careless small talk. Of course, it turns out Zuckerberg was right when he told users to “calm down and breathe”, and Newsfeed has been naturalised into the Facebook experience. Another, more scarring experience was Beacon — its attempt to track what users in the US bought on partner sites — and tell on them to their friends. After an avalanche of protests, Facebook backed down and modified the ad platform. It even employs a chief privacy officer to address our fears.

In the early days, Facebook generated awkwardness because it didn’t respect context — the fact that you wear and cast off selves depending on who you’re interacting with, your crazy roommate or your conservative grand-aunt who decided to befriend you online. “It is the problem that arises when worlds collide, when norms get caught in the crossfire between communities, when walls that separate social situations come crashing down,” writes Chris Peterson of the University of Massachusetts, who has studied Facebook’s privacy architecture.

But now you can tweak settings and set up differential access. People have figured out how to work Facebook and not get burnt. “Profile pictures flatter, tagged pictures shatter,” says Priya Singh, a twenty-something law student, with a laugh. “You never know what someone’s going to put up and who’s going to see what. I don’t want everyone to see drunken party pictures, and so I’ve just learnt to place family on a new level of privacy settings.” And that’s the general pattern on Facebook: most people have learnt to adjust to the public glare, after some initial blinking and bemusement.

Privacy from Whom?

You can segment your social world as minutely as you like, but that doesn’t mean your life is any more private. It’s not just the fact that potential employers can scan and dismiss you, or current employers keep tabs — though such stories abound. For instance, MIT’s Gaydar research project discovered that you can identify a person’s sexual preferences by studying who their friends are on Facebook, even if they have avoided sharing that information in their profile.

But perhaps we have been gulled into thinking that the whole privacy fuss is about each other. “It’s very clever of Facebook to foreground this aspect of control. Your other friends, pictures, the games you play — that’s something we regularly give out anyway”, says Nishant Shah, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “But Facebook is not a single entity — it is a collection of third party apps (applications) that we have no control over. A simple birthday calendar can harvest all your data, all your online traces and you grant it access without knowing it,” he says. So Facebook makes a big show of protecting you from your acquaintances, even as it sells your information continuously.

This becomes a much bigger possibility when it comes to search engine integration, which allows the open flow on Facebook to be harnessed for perfect reach and recall.

To get a clearer sense of what’s at stake with these influential corporations, take a more powerful example: Google.com. Every day, we confide our trivial confusions, our deep doubts to one willing ear. And these billions of broken questions can add up to an eerily accurate picture of the world. But do you search Google or does Google search you? “Google can track you across applications: email, search, blogs, pictures and books read. That means they can profile you in a very detailed, exhaustive way, and they do,’ says Rahul Matthan. “They never delete information, and they’re getting progressively more intelligent about you, as they make search more relevant with features like Google Suggest.” As technology scholar Siva Vaidyanathan puts it, “we have to realise that we are not Google’s customers. We are its product. We are what Google sells to advertisers.” These behaviourially targeted ads are the most perfect, evolved form of advertising so far and in concept, the least annoying, because they are customised to you. Google has promised that its information is utterly secure and that search logs are anonymised after a certain period.

It provides limited disclosure of outside ads, lets users manage the categories that Google has assigned to them and tinker with it for a more accurate picture and also provides an opt-out option. But Search 2.0 is a scary beast — it can also facilitate social control and surveillance. Your online activities are not scattered across applications any more, Google can hear what you tell Facebook.

While selling us stuff more efficiently is probably a good thing, what happens when this intimate knowledge shades into active surveillance? Even if we live in countries where rights are respected, “we give out enough personal information in an innocuous way to a single repository. They are sitting on top of a very valuable resource, and all this information can easily be reverse-engineered to reveal specifics about you,” says Rahul Matthan, technology lawyer and founder-partner of Trilegal.

In India, we are even more oblivious to such stealthy watching. “Privacy concerns here are lesser than in the West, where they’re so dependent on digital ID. There, if someone impersonates you or overdraws credit limits, it could affect your house, your job,” says Matthan.

Privacy legislation doesn’t really exist in India — the right to keep personal information confidential has only been articulated as protection against state action. “There’s no easy legal recourse to being thoroughly spied on by a company,” says Matthan (Europe has enforced data protection directives since 1984 — you can control what information is gathered about you, and how it is used. While the US has somewhat diluted laws, personal information is still strongly guarded). While it’s tempting to think that you have nothing to hide, you are acceding to a set-up where outliers can be identified and dealt with. Privacy matters, no matter how unexceptionable your own life. So what’s to be done? “Holding Facebook and other companies to account is crucial. We must set up legislations by which people can look back, ask exactly what about their activity is being tracked. They have to treat consumers as peers,” says Shah. “If Facebook can gaze at us, we must be given the right to gaze back at its functioning — it has to be a peer-to-peer relationship.”

So far, Facebook and the Googleverse and Twitter are still our friends and enablers. But as they amass more and more power, it is better to see them as fallible companies rather than confidantes, and to make sure that they account for our information.

For original article on the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/de-facebook