We are anonymous, we are legion

How Sai Baba Was Made To Spy On Your Phone For Credit Ratings

Gopal Sathe — 2019-07-08T14:04:35Z

Researchers revealed that Hyderabad-based CreditVidya—a highly successful fintech company that rated people’s creditworthiness—collected data from people using music apps and Sai Baba apps.

The article by Gopal Sathe was published by Huffington Post on July 4, 2019. CIS research was quoted.

An Indian start-up that few outside the fintech industry would have heard of embedded tracking software inside popular apps, including one that streamed Sai Baba stories and another that streamed Ilaiyaraaja songs, to scoop up sensitive user data including GPS locations, and business SMSes from ecommerce sites and banks to monitor spending activity, personal contacts, and much more, HuffPost India has found.

CreditVidya, a Hyderabad-based fin-tech company, ran this snooping code (technically known as a Software Development Kit or SDK) for several months in 2017 until a new version of Google’s Android operating system made it harder to scrape such data. The data, scooped up from users, was used to power CreditVidya’s self-learning algorithms that help lending companies determine the credit-worthiness of loan applicants. (Fin-tech is industry speak for financial technology, a fast growing category of software firms).

SDKs like the one developed by CreditVidya are called “Middleware”. If you assume an app is like a machine, middleware would be a component or a cog in that machine. As apps grow more complex, developers often rely on middleware developed by third parties, increasing the risk that user data is scraped and sold on for a fee.

Upon installing these apps, many of which were developed by a third party app developer call Winjit, users would have been asked for access permissions that are increasingly common and intrusive, but would have had no idea that their personal data was being scraped and sold further in a manner that could affect their credit-worthiness.

“Even though there might not be proper notice / informed consent, at least it’s understandable that lending apps that user uses is downloaded consciously and some night have knowledge on the fact that app,” said Srikanth L., a contributor to Cashless Consumer, a collective studying digital payments and fintech businesses in India. “The Creditvidya SDK was also found in a Sai Baba app, Ilaiyaraaja Hits app and other music apps of popular record labels with its SDK where user is clueless about this background data collection.”

Thus a user could consent to an app collecting data without knowing how such data would be used.

CreditVidya, Srikanth said, “used the data from unsuspecting users as part of the huge database it uses to generate the trust score, but there is opaqueness about where this data comes from and how many data brokers were engaged in trading personal data with companies like CreditVidya.”

Worse, given that many of these algorithms are proprietary and hence un-auditable, it is unclear if these credit-rating apps even work. Users could find themselves denied credit, or charged high interest rates on the basis of purely arbitrary decision making by CreditVidya algorithms trained on data scraped on the sly.

“Given how untransparent the industry is,” said Fredrike Kaltheuner, from the Data Exploitation Programme of Privacy International, a privacy-focused global non-profit organisation that investigates and advocates for user privacy. “It’s hard to say if this information is actually helping anyone get a loan. There are a lot of companies in this space now, but their algorithms are a black box, and the data they use is usually not clear either.”

CreditVidya and Winjit did not reply to HuffPost India’s emailed requests for comment. We will update this story if the companies share a response.

Meet CreditVidya

CreditVidya does not offer loans directly to consumers. Instead, the company offers its services to over 50 lenders, ranging from banks like Axis Bank, DBS, Yes Bank, and financing companies like Tata Capital, TVS Credit, and Hero FinCorp, according CreditVidya’s website.

This means that when consumers approach these companies for loans, CreditVidya’s software helps determine if the loan should be given or not. To do so, the company compares a given loan application with its giant database, to evolve something called “Trust-score” that, the company claims, determines if the applicant is likely to pay back the loan.

The company raised Series A funding from Kalaari Capital, and Matrix Partners joined in its Series B round. It has raised a third round of funding as well, led by the Bharat Innovation Fund. One of the partners at the fund is Sanjay Jain, former Chief Product Officer at the UIDAI, and a volunteer at Bengaluru-based think-tank iSPIRT.

In a blog post, Kailash Nath, a Senior Associate at Bharat Innovation Fund wrote that CreditVidya processes over 500GB of data every day. It uses data related to over 10,000 parameters to assess creditworthiness, and plugs its SDK into the lenders’ apps, to make the decision to approve the loan or not. He added that the platform has processed over 25 million profiles so far. The post does not mention anything about the sources of this vast amount of data.

“It’s not necessary that the data is coming from nefarious means,” said Saravanan K., a Bengaluru-based security consultant. “There could be any number of ways in which the company has acquired this data, and a lot of it is above board — people aren’t always aware of what they are signing up for, where they are giving their data.”

“Your phone number acts as a unifying element, and then the amount of data that becomes available about you simply from offline sources will boggle your mind. But getting data directly from your phone can be very valuable, because it’s happening in real time and gives a very clear picture of what you are doing.”

The companies doing all this data gathering are keeping quiet about the matter. For example, Srikanth found CreditVidya’s SDK in a number of applications made by Winjit, which has developed a number of music apps, including for huge companies like Times Music. However, the nature of the relationship between the two companies is not clear; nor have they made any public statement on why Winjit’s apps on music carried CreditVidya’s lending SDK.

When a user downloaded a Winjit app, it would create a profile linked to their phone number, and then update this, analysis of the SDK by Cashless Consumer showed. APIs in the SDK revealed code for the user being initialised, and the data being updated.

A report by Aayush Rathi and Shweta Mohandas for the Centre for Internet and Society that researched the privacy commitments taken by Indian fin-tech companies also goes over some of this ground.

“The unprecedented growth of this sector with a number of players that have an amorphous nature (not banking entities) has concomitantly come with regulatory challenges around inter alia privacy and security concerns,” Rathi and Mohandas say in their report. “For instance, a survey of 1,300 senior executives in the global financial services, and fintech industries revealed that 54% of respondents identified privacy and data protection as barriers to fintech innovation.”

They also noted that a study stated identified that 79.4 percent of the surveyed participants stated that they did not read the privacy policies and only 11 percent of them stated that they understood them. They also wrote that another study conducted on the most popular apps in India also observed that the privacy policies were drafted to protect the service providers from liability, rather than to help the consumers.

What’s in the SDK?

Analysis of the SDK by Srikanth suggests CreditVidya collected the following info:

Mobile IMEI
All contacts
Measured frequency of SIM changes to see if this is a person who frequently swaps SIMs
GPS location
Business SMS to monitor spending activity
Wifi ON/OFF

Given that CreditVidya talks of over 10,000 data points, it’s safe to say that this is not all the information that the company is collecting about potential borrowers. What’s particularly worrying in this case though is how the information was being collected through applications that have nothing to do with lending.

“They are collecting user specific data, and also location specific data for demographic mapping,” said Srikanth L. of Cashless Consumer.

Getting data directly from your phone can be very valuable, because it’s happening in real time and gives a very clear picture of what you are doing.

Kaltheuner, from Privacy International, said this kind of arrangement with SDKs is not uncommon.

“A lot of researchers have come across such arrangements,” said Kaltheuner, “but it is very hard to find actual evidence.” In that sense, the work done by Cashless Consumer is very important, she added, as it shows how companies are quietly collecting user data.

“But a bigger concern is the use of pre-installed applications for tracking,” she added. “These apps are installed by the phone manufacturers, or by the telecom companies, and that’s how you get very cheap smartphones being subsidised by third party trackers.”

“These pre-installed trackers often don’t need to ask you for permission before getting access to your data, and they can have access to deeper information than the third-party trackers,” she said. This is made worse by how opaque the industry is; information flows in only one direction.”

“Middleware is very hard to track because there are a number of ways in which companies are going around regulations. Even if a developer doesn’t mean to take your data, it’s often very hard to know what all an SDK is going to do. This is a systemic problem in the industry, with a lot of reliance on third party software.”

Standard procedure in India

Although a number of developers who spoke to HuffPost India confirmed that practices like these are common in the Indian ecosystem, they refused to go on the record, explaining that this is normal business practice, and speaking out about it will lead to a loss of opportunities in the future.

“The big change was Google cracking down on this stuff, but otherwise it’s all over the place,” one developer based in Bengaluru said. “Like, there’s a company in Bombay whose business model is to offer its SDK for apps, and it basically gives you solutions like OTP capture — but it also keeps tracking SMS data afterwards, which is used to build a financial profile. And they offer a cut for doing this, so it subsidises the cost of developing the app.”

Another developer said that IBM’s analytics middleware has also created similar problems but refused to give any details fearing reprisals from the company which has offered his startup projects in the past. However, IBM denied the allegation—a representative said that it would require more technical details from the developer to give a detailed response, but the developer refused to share further information.

But the problem is actually not limited to India. In May 2019, mobile app developer QuarkWorks found that one of its apps on the Google Play store was flagged and removed for violating store policies. According to Devun Schmutzler, Native Mobile Developer QuarkWorks, Google said their app was violating Android’s advertising ID policy.

Google had identified that the app collected and transmitted the Android advertising identifier, which could be used to identify and target a user.

Except, according to Schmutzler, the app wasn’t either collecting, or transmitting any data as far as the developers were aware. It was at this point that the team carried out an investigation into the matter, and found their app was using an old version of Fabric Crashlytics—middleware developed by a third party, which was embedded in the Quarkworks app to analyze crashes and other software errors. The Crashlytics component was collecting this information without Quarkworks’s knowledge.

But this was just the only bit of middleware they found tracking sensitive user information.

Firebase, which is a mobile and Web development platform acquired by Google also does this, though it’s very easy to change the settings to stop sending this data, Schmutzler noted.

OneSignal, which is used for high volume mobile and Web push notifications also tracks this user information, and QuarkWorks had to tweak the app to limit the data being shared. These were just the ones found in the case of a small app with limited libraries by one developer, but given the scale of the industry, the number of providers that are collecting user data in an opaque manner is simply staggering.

Google and Apple have evolved policies against the sharing of background data through apps which are available online. Although the companies did not share details about the size of teams in India that audit apps, for both platforms privacy has become a big talking point with Apple highlighting this for multiple years now, and Google also strongly talking about privacy in the last Google IO developer conference.

In India though, companies like this are likely to soon get another tool to use to track and profile users—Aadhaar. The Aadhaar Amendment bill is expected to pass in the Lok Sabha, and once it becomes a law, the use of Aadhaar by the private sector opens up again.

Once that happens, aside from your phone number, there is also a permanent, immutable identity that can be used to track a person, or collate their information.

Is this data even useful?

It is possible that companies are compromising users’ privacy on a broad scale, but coming up with results that are not more accurate than traditional lending was.

HuffPost India reached out to several lending companies who did not wish to comment on this story once we explained that it was about the covert collection of user data, in the past, some of these companies have commented about the use of data.

Speaking to this reporter in the past, Bala Parthasarathy, the Chairman and CEO of lending app MoneyTap said that “the data is not sophisticated enough. We use mostly traditional data. Right now, there are a lot of low hanging fruit whom the banks are too rigid for, and that’s where we can make a difference.”

“Typically, companies look at a number of different factors, so they’ll look at your account data, or they might read your SMS messages to track your spending,” he had said. “This is of course a privacy concern. But they read your transaction SMSes to understand your financial history. They might take a look at the apps on your phone, or your social media logins to see what kind of relationships you have, how strong a local circle you have, so they know you’re not going to disappear.”

MoneyTap, on the other hand, he said was mostly using user data only to make filling the forms simpler since they had to be entered through the company’s app on the phone.

As Privacy International’s Kaltheuner pointed out—such algorithms being a black box means that there is no clarity on whether anyone is actually benefiting from such use of data, yet it’s quickly becoming the norm.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-gopal-sathe-july-4-2019-fintech-apps-privacy-snooping-credit-vidya

DIDP #34 On granular detail on ICANN's budget for policy development process

akriti — 2019-07-06T01:23:55Z

ICANN has Advisory Committees which help guide the policy recommendations that the ICANN community develops while its Supporting Organizations are charged with developing policy recommendations for a particular aspect of ICANN's operations. Supporting Organizations are composed of volunteers from the community. ICANN publishes a combined budget for all these bodies under the head of policy development and CIS inquired about the financial resources allocated to each of them specifically.

The ICANN budgets are published for public comment yet the community does not have supporting documents to illustrate how the numbers were estimated or the rationale for allocation of the resources. There is a lack of transparency when it comes to the internal budgeting.

This DIDP is concerned with the policy development budget which, as Stephanie Perrin of the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group pointed out, was merely 5% of ICANN’s total budget, a number significantly low for a policy making organization. Thus, the information we request is a detailed breakdown for the budgets for every Advisory Council as well as Supporting Organizations for the previous fiscal year. You can find the attached request here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/didp-34-on-granular-detail-on-icanns-budget-for-policy-development-process

PIB plans a fact-checking unit to counter fake news

Smriti Kak Ramachandran — 2019-07-05T02:31:49Z

The article by Smriti Kak Ramachandran was published in the Hindustan Times on July 3, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The Press Information Bureau (PIB), the government’s nodal agency for dissemination of information, has decided to set up of a fact checking unit to identify and counter any fake news about the government and its policies circulating on social media platforms.

According to a senior functionary aware of the development, the ministry of information and broadcasting (MIB), under which PIB is a unit has approved a plan to counter fake news in real-time. No deadline has been set so far for the project to take off, but it is expected to pick pace over the coming weeks. Details of how the tracking will be done, and the kind of accounts that will be tracked, weren’t immediately available.

The fact check unit will have officials from the PIB as well as employees hired on contract to monitor platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Youtube to flag news that is fake and has the potential for creating social unrest.

“We will monitor and detect anything related to the government that is blatantly wrong, and put out correct information to ensure that people do not fall for wrong news,” the functionary quoted above said on condition of anonymity. He added that the possibility of penal action against those accounts found circulating fake news has not been discussed.

“We had a training session with a Hyderabad-based organisation, which does work in fact checking and putting out data that is meant for the public. Their experts helped us brainstorm on how to proceed with it,” the official said.

Countering fake news has been high on the government’s agenda; in 2016; the MIB suggested expanding its analytics wing to monitor social media and set up an early warning system for possible flashpoints that the government may be unprepared for. The social media analytics wing of the ministry, which is now defunct, scrutinized posts on social media platforms to generate reports for the Prime Minister’s Office, the National Security Advisor’ s Office and various intelligence bureaus, aside from ministries including home affairs, external affairs and defence.

In 2018, the ministry constituted a committee to frame rules to regulate news portals and media websites. During the recently concluded Lok Sabha election, the election commission also worked with social media platforms to identify and pull down posts that were fake and could lead to vitiating the elections.
As per EC’s data, 650 posts were taken down by Facebook for voter misinformation, hate speech, violation of the model code of conduct and public morality and decency. Similarly, Twitter took down 220 posts, Sharechat 31, Google 5 and Whatsapp, three.

Commenting on the government’s move to set up the fact check unit, Sunil Abraham, of the Centre for Internet and Society, a research organisation said, “It is a good move; but what the government also needs to do is to have a policy in place which makes it necessary for social media companies to pay for the negative externalities being circulated. If they make a certain amount in revenue from advertising then on a similar scale they need to fund the fact checking ecosystem.”
On Monday Congress leader Digvijay Singh also demanded a policy to check fake news. Speaking during Zero Hour in the Rajya Sabha, Singh said fake news is more dangerous than terrorism.

He said fake news and unparliamentary language used on social media platforms trigger communal riots and create societal divide. “Many people (tweeting fake news) are followed by big people,” he said without naming anyone.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/pibplans-a-fact-checking-unit-to-counter-fake-news

Setting the Agenda: A Behavioural Science approach to Data Privacy

Admin — 2019-07-04T16:47:31Z

Amber Sinha attended a meeting organised by the Centre for Social Behaviour Change (CSBC) at Ashoka University and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics on 26 June 2019 at CSBC office, Vasant Vihar in New Delhi.

The session brought together a small group (8-12) of critical players from industry, academia, and the public sector to solicit inputs on the structure and content of India’s first experiment-based behavioural research on data privacy. This body of research, set to launch in the next few months, will use a behavioural science approach to answer 4 main topics facing data privacy: (1) consent practices, (2) business advantages for enhanced privacy, (3) willingness to pay, and (4) nudges to improve engagement in privacy. Equipped with a behavioural science toolkit, we aim to produce new evidence through lab and field experiments that help define best practices in data privacy across these topics. More info here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/setting-the-agenda-a-behavioural-science-approach-to-data-privacy

Digital ID Forum 2019

Admin — 2019-08-07T14:09:16Z

Sunil Abraham was one of the panelists at this event at Chulalongkorn University on July 3, 2019.

Click to view the agenda. Also see Wikipedia page

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/digital-id-forum-2019

The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet

Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover — 2019-07-03T12:53:53Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with the Internet Society organized an event on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. It was divided into two roundtable discussions, the first one focusing on the policies and regulation while the latter dealt with the technical evolution of the Internet. This report contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy.

Edited by Swaraj Barooah, Elonnai Hickok and Vishnu Ramachandran. Inputs by Swagam Dasgupta

This report is a summary of the proceedings of the roundtables organized by the Centre for Internet and Society in partnership with the Internet Society on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. It was conducted under the Chatham House Rule, at The Energy and Resource Institute, Bangalore on the 29 June 2018 from 11AM to 4PM. This report was authored on 29 June 2018, and subsequently edited for readability on 25 June 2019. This report contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy.

The roundtables aimed to analyze how growing forces of consolidation, including concentration, vertical and horizontal integration, and barriers to market entry and competition would influence the Internet in the next 3 to 5 years.

To provide for sufficient investigation, the discussions were divided across two sessions. The focus of the first group was the impact of consolidation on applicable regulatory andpolicy norms including regulation of internet services, the potential to secure or undermine people’s ability to choose services, and the overall impact on the political economy. Thesecond discussion delved into the effect of consolidation on the technical evolution of the internet (in terms of standards, tools and software practices) and consumer choices (interms of standards of privacy, security, other human rights).

The sessions had participants from the private sector (2), research (4), government (1), technical community (3) and civil society organizations (6). Five women and eleven men constituted the participant list.

Click to download and read the full report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-and-gurshabad-grover-july-3-2019-impact-of-consolidation-in-the-internet-economy-on-the-evolution-of-the-internet

Facebook’s Libra: A bit too ambitious?

Rajmohan Sudhakar — 2019-07-02T05:14:56Z

Power desperately finds ways to propagate at the slightest hint of losing lustre, which the social network is beginning to experience at the moment.

The article by Rajmohan Sudhakar was published in the Deccan Herald on June 30, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

A social network must remain a social network and first prove it is indeed one. Not a bank. Damning revelations concerning ethics, privacy and transparency notwithstanding.

For a tech giant with an exclusive window to our private lives, launching its own currency is of course the natural course, to coax us back into compliance, away from brewing skepticism.

Facebook’s sketchy white paper on Libra, its proposed virtual currency, probably drawing much from the libertarian Bitcoin, is no doubt an attempt to capitalise on the 2.4 billion users it has collected in such a short span, eventually to wield a grip on the still vulnerable global financial system gradually recovering from a crisis.

However, the brute power of big tech looms large over sovereign nation states.

In his piece in The Atlantic, professor Eric Posner of the University of Chicago Law School writes Libra will replicate all the current problems generated by Facebook. “In the name of eliminating inefficiency and injustice in the financial system around the globe, Facebook’s new cryptocurrency threatens to replay what’s become a familiar story—of tech companies blithely reshaping the world around them, and significantly increasing their power over people’s lives, while being accountable to no one,” the professor goes on to say.

Power finds ways to propagate at the slightest hint of losing lustre, which the social network is beginning to experience at the moment.

To salvage that lost credibility, Facebook has teamed up with a group of corporates including Visa, Uber, Spotify, PayPal and the like to form the Libra Association, a Geneva-based not-for-profit, just to disrupt and dominate the global economic future.

Given the social network’s massive reach, the proposal, if realised, could transform international payments. That said, the intent is suspect.

“The main concern with Facebook entering the cryptocurrency market is a question of competition law. Facebook can use its market dominance in online advertising, end-to-end encrypted messaging and social media to engage in anti-competitive behaviour, warns Sunil Abraham of The Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based not-for-profit.

Facebook stands 90th in the world in terms of GDP, along with many other firms of such standing which would want to effect and dictate global monetary policy if the project goes ahead and realises its commercial goal, which in all likelihood is very much possible. Because, Facebook has built its applications and networks already. It doesn’t require to sign people up. Lambs for slaughter indeed.

The argument that the network puts forward of uplifting billions excluded from the financial ecosystem in the emerging world, in earnest is a genuine cause. But, one doesn’t need a brand new private currency pepped up by a big tech consortium for that. For instance, in India, where the network has at least 300 million users, Libra cannot operate within the existing norms. Moreover, a foreign private entity controlling the sovereign is rather dystopian.

“So far, India has taken quite a conservative policy towards cryptocurrencies because of concerns from a counter-terrorism and taxation perspective. It is perhaps good that policymakers were waiting and watching. Now the policy will have to address the challenge posed by Facebook entering this market,” notes Abraham.

“Cryptocurrency is ‘virtual money’ which should only be used for non-financial purposes along the lines of loyalty points, airline miles, etc. which could be exchanged for real cash transactions such as discounts. It poses the danger of fraud. If Facebook uses Libra to clock up loyalty points, that’s fine. But can’t link it to your bank account,” cautions Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw.To digress, bitcoin works as people trust it over government-regulated money. It has no reserve. It appreciates if more people are using it. Now, Facebook is offering a tweak. Unlike Bitcoin, Libra will have a reserve set up by the consortium. In short, don’t trust the government, not the liberal bitcoin, but a private entity with a reserve.
Facebook’s argument may be convincing provided the clout, security infrastructure and reach. But what is worrying is Facebook-led big tech now wants to be a virtual country, with its own economy, not having to bow down to nation states and regulators, because they think they are powerful enough to do so.
This would definitely have banks and regulators in a fix. “While Facebook might have a surveillance friendly position on KYC requirements for users, it might be in greater consumer interest for the government to ensure there is an interoperable competitive oligopoly of cryptocurrency service providers that prevent the winner takes all phenomenon,” observes Abraham.
What’s Libra anyway?
Libra is a virtual currency proposed by a Facebook-led private consortium, with a reserve, unlike the Bitcoin. That means Libra would have an initial capital funded by the consortium to help make it a stable currency such as the dollar. Users could trade globally enjoying lower costs, enhanced speed and high security - on platforms run by Facebook (Calibra) and associates. According to Facebook, Libra is intended to ensure financial inclusion. But how this will be achieved in countries like India, where the currency would not charm the people, government or regulators easily, is not yet quite clear.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deccan-herald-june-30-2019-rajmohan-sudhakar-facebook-s-libra-a-bit-too-ambitious

June 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-07-16T16:00:11Z

The Centre for Internet & Society Newsletter for June 2019.

Highlights for June 2019

Rohini Lakshané and Shweta Mohandas have updated their paper 'Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone SEP Litigation' which chronicles mobile device SEP litigation in India. All developments in the lawsuits filed in the Delhi High Court and complaints made to the CCI that were published in reliable sources till 20 September 2018 are mentioned in this paper. Christ University in association with CIS-A2K organized the Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019, from 20 - 22 June 2019, at Christ University, Bengaluru. Forty-nine Wikimedians from four countries (Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, and India) participated in the event. Subodh Kulkarni in his report reveals that the event discussed challenges pertaining to retention and quality and methodologies to evaluate and measure the work being done on Wikipedia. CIS and Internet Society organized an event on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. The round-tables focused on the policies and regulation and technical evolution of the Internet. The report by Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover contributed to the Internet Society’s 2019 Global Internet Report on Consolidation in the Internet Economy. An excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives was mirrored on the website. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

CIS and the News

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

5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; June 6, 2019).
Staying silent about cyberbullying is no longer an option (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 16, 2019).
Facebook sees its salvation with its cryptocurrency Libra (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; June 30, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Plugging into India’s broadband revolution (Navadha Pandey; Livemint; June 4, 2019).
Banking on artificial intelligence: In hiring drive, Bots are calling the shots now (Anjali Venugopal; Economic Times; June 4, 2019).
Fragmenting Cybersecurity Norms through the Language(s) of Subalternity: India in the East and the Global Community (Riccardo Vecellio Segate; Columbia Journal of Law; June 6, 2019).
Interpreting the Outer Space Treaty's Non-Appropriation Principle: Customary International Law from 1967 to Today (Abigail D. Pershing; Yale Journal of International Law; June 6, 2019).
No Fintech company meets every single privacy requirement under IT Act: CIS report (Shilpa S. Ranipeta; Newsminute; June 10, 2019).
Facebook to pay Indians to give up privacy: Experts raise questions (Geetika Mantri; Newsminute; June 14, 2019).
Chasing fame and fun 15 seconds at a time: Why TikTok has India hooked (Tora Agarwala, Surbhi Gupta, and Karishma Mehrotra; Indian Express; June 23, 2019).
Facebook’s Libra: A bit too ambitious? (Rajmohan Sudhakar; Deccan Herald; June 30, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

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

Copyright & Patent

Research Paper

Joining the Dots in India's Big-Ticket Mobile Phone SEP Litigation (Rohini Lakshané and Shweta Mohandas; June 30, 2019).

Wikipdedia

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

Blog Entries

What is Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference? (Sailesh Patnaik; June 5, 2019).
Karavali Wikimedians at All India Radio, Mangaluru (Bharathesha Alasandemajalu; June 13, 2019).
Wikimedia Education SAARC Conference 2019 (Subodh Kulkarni; June 22, 2019).
SVG translation workshop Kannada (Gopala Krishna; June 29, 2019).

Jobs

CIS-A2K team is seeking applications for the following posts:

Event Organized

Wikimedia Education SAARC conference (Christ University; Bangalore; June 20 - 22, 2019).

Openness

Innovation and creativity are fostered through openness and collaboration. The advent of the Internet 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 work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software.

Event Hosted

Discussion on Open Standards with Bernd Erk and Jiten Vaidya (CIS, Bangalore; June 20, 2019).

Participation in Event

Rootconf 2019 (Organized by Has Geek; NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore; June 21 - 22, 2019). Karan Saini participated in the event.

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Blog Entry

The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet (Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover; July 3, 2019).

Event Organized

Setting the Agenda: A Behavioural Science approach to Data Privacy (Organized by Centre for Social Behaviour Change; Ashoka University and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, Vasant Vihar, New Delhi). Amber Sinha attended the meeting.

Participation in Events

Pranesh Prakash as Resource Person for ITD seminar on Competition (Organized by International Institute for Trade and Development; Bangkok; June 24 - 26, 2019). Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker in the session on Consumer Protection and Digital Rights- Defining Welfare and Fair Competition.

Cyber Security

Participation in Events

The Global Nature of Cybersecurity in a Changing World (Organized by Hewlett Foundation; San Diego; June 20 - 22, 2019).
Workshop on Cyber-Ethics: Values-driven Innovative Solutions (Organized by Embassy of Switzerland; Bangalore; June 28, 2019). Arindrajit Basu moderated a discussion on Cyber-Ethics.

Free Speech

Participation in Events

ICANN Masterclass (Organized by ICANN, Bangalore; June 19, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.
ICANN 65 (Organized by ICANN; Morocco; June 24 - 27, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the event.

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.

Article

5G Aspirations and Realities (Shyam Ponappa; Organizing India Blogspot; June 6, 2019).

Researchers at Work (RAW)

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Essay

Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers (Sadaf Khan; June 11, 2019). This was written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives.

Participation in Event

Unpacking video-based surveillance in New Delhi (Organized by the University of Manchester, England; June 14, 2019). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon presented their research on 'Urban Data, Inequality and Justice in the Global South'.

Blog Entries

Patreon: Understanding the Intersection of Art, Artiste, and Labour (Upasana Bhattacharjee; June 1, 2019).
#ArchivesForStorytelling (Aliyeh Rizvi, Bhanu Prakash, Dinesh, Malini Ghanathe, and Venkat Srinivasan; June 1, 2019).
#DigitalIdentities (Anjali K Mohan, Harish Boya, Janaki Srinivasan, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sarita Seshagiri; June 11, 2019).

About CIS

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

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

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

Workshop on Cyber-Ethics: Values-driven Innovative Solutions

Admin — 2019-07-06T00:51:20Z

Arindrajit Basu moderated a discussion on Cyber-Ethics at Swiss Nex (Consulate General of Switzerland, Bangalore on 28 June 2019. The event was organized by the Embassy of Switzerland.

Cyber-space – the virtual reality – influences all countries in the world and all sectors of society. The cyber-world of e-mails, e-commerce, e-government, e-education, e-music, e-prosecutors, artificial intelligence, crypto-currencies are daily reality, with new opportunities. On the other hand, cyber-bullying, cyber-criminality, cyber-security, cyber-war etc. are great challenges.

Cyber-ethics looks for values-driven innovative solutions to these challenges and opportunities between freedom and privacy, security and peace. Switzerland is a world leader in innovation, India is a world leader in information technologies. How can both countries strengthen ethical, values-driven solutions for the cyber-world? Indian and Swiss Experts present challenges and solutions.

Programme

10.00 Registration & welcome tea n coffee

10:30 Welcome remarks

Mr.Sebastien Hug, CEO, swissnex India and Consul General of Switzerland

10:35 Keynote address: Cyber-Ethics between Global Values and Contextual Interests

Prof. Dr. H.C. Christoph Stückelberger, Founder and President of Globethics.net, Visiting Professor of Ethics in Nigeria, Russia, China

11:05 Moderated panel discussion

Moderator: Arindrajit Basu, Senior Policy Officer, Center for Internet and Society,

Panelists:

Dr. Pavan Duggal, Founder and President of the International Commission on Cyber Security Law, Advocate at Supreme Court of India

Dr Siobhán Martin, Deputy Head, Leadership, Crisis and Conflict Management, Geneva Centre for Security Policy

Mr Sameer Chothani, Managing Director - Group Technology, India, UBS

12:15 Q&A

12:45 Networking lunch

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/workshop-on-cyber-ethics-values-driven-innovative-solutions

ICANN 65

Admin — 2019-07-06T01:08:36Z

Akriti Bopanna attended ICANN 65 in Marrakech, Morocco from 24 - 27 June 2019.

Akriti spoke on ICANN and Human Rights at a session organized by the At-Large and Non-Commercial Users Constituency.
The Government Advisory Council discussed how government representatives can get involved in the Human Rights Impact Assessment work which the working party that she co-chairs on Human Rights at ICANN has been conducting. Akriti spoke on the feasibility of organizing a High Interest Session on Human Rights at ICANN66.
Akriti participated in a public meeting of ICANN's Board on their Anti-Harassment Policy and my suggestions/remarks on improving the samte were received well.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/icann-65

Pranesh Prakash as Resource Person for ITD seminar on Competition

Admin — 2019-07-04T16:23:51Z

Pranesh Prakash represented the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) as a resource person for a training seminar held by the International Institute for Trade and Development, which is an organization with a UN mandate and funding by the Thai government. The event was held from 24 - 26 June 2019 at Bangkok.

The theme was "Competition Law and Policy for Sustainable Development". The audience was made up of government officials (mostly from competition commissions or from commerce ministries) from Thailand, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam. Click here to view the programme schedule. Pranesh Prakash was also a speaker in the session on Consumer Protection and Digital Rights- Defining Welfare and Fair Competition.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/pranesh-prakash-as-resource-person-for-itd-seminar-on-competition

Chasing fame and fun 15 seconds at a time: Why TikTok has India hooked

Tora Agarwala, Surbhi Gupta, and Karishma Mehrotra — 2019-07-05T02:13:39Z

How TikTok, an app owned by a Chinese firm, has become a playground for India’s young.

The article by Tora Agarwala, Surbhi Gupta, and Karishma Mehrotra appeared in Indian Express on June 23, 2019. Nishant Shah was quoted.

“Kaam nai niki? Do you have no other work?” At a banner printing shop in Nagaon, a town in Assam, the middle-aged shopkeeper was bemused. It was the strangest order he had received in a while.

For one, the banner was for a “TikTok” meetup. He had not the slightest inkling of what that was. Second, the two boys who had introduced themselves as hailing from Jamuguri and Raha, smaller towns in the state, insisted that the text incorporate a spelling mistake. “Instead of M-E-E-T up, please write M-E-A-T up,” he was told. The shopkeeper grudgingly obliged and the boys rode off on their bikes. It would be ready the next day.

“This is going to go viral,” Dhurbajit Medhi said triumphantly to his friend PK Nath. They had only known each other for a month, having “met” on TikTok. In April, they sat face-to-face for the first time at a small restaurant in Raha, in Nagaon district, where Medhi lived. Nath had travelled 110 km to meet him.

Medhi was 23, a singer who had dropped out of college because of a death in the family. Nath, about 30, was known in his neighbourhood in Jamuguri for two things: his gela maal dukaan (grocery store) and his penchant to make people laugh.

On TikTok, both have followers in thousands. Over a few months, they would chat often, appreciating each other’s videos. “On a sad day, I would scroll through Nath da’s feed and it would make me laugh without fail,” says Medhi, who joined TikTok about a year ago. Many comments on his videos are from girls. “Some say ‘cute’ and some say bhaal laagise (You’re looking good),” says Medhi, who is reasonably tall and sports a goatee on his boyish face.

Over the year, Medhi has learnt the tricks of the TikTok trade. “There are two kinds of videos which get attention here in Assam: either you do sad, romantic songs. Or you do fotuami — slapstick humour,” says Medhi, who has made a niche for himself in the former category. He owns an Mi phone, worth Rs 11,000, which he bought a year ago by saving money through his work at his father’s tea shop. “My mother is okay with me making these videos. But she says, ‘Do all this, but think about your life also.’ I get her point but maybe I can make a career out of this,” he says.

After all, TikTok is not as easy as Facebook. It involves an element of skill. “Do you know how difficult it is to get one TikTok like? On Facebook, you just put a photo and the likes pour in. Here, we have to work hard.” Medhi admits he was naïve initially. “I would make photo-collages from my trips to Kaziranga and add some background music.” But that would not have worked. “The viewer takes into account everything: is our lip-sync matching? Are our clothes suited to the mood of the music? Are our expressions accurate?”

Today, Medhi has over 400 videos, many of which feature him mouthing lyrics to the songs sung by Assamese musician Zubeen Garg. Sometimes, he sings in his own voice too — a secret talent he has nurtured but not had the opportunity to explore. “In Upper Assam, there is an appreciation for the arts and music. But here in middle Assam, it is different. People would mock, ‘Eeeh gayok hobo ahise. Look at him trying to be a singer,’” says Medhi.

It is these aspirations, which often get mowed down by the traditionalism that comes with living in small towns and villages that TikTok is giving oxygen to. The short-form video app has seen a phenomenal growth since its rebranding from Musical.ly in 2018, garnering 200 million users in India alone. Its hallmark is simple: it woos your attention with 15-second videos (they make go up to 60 seconds too) of lip-syncing teenage girls, dancing boys, family pranks and other such stylised moments. The mobile app’s owner, a Chinese internet company called ByteDance, was reportedly awarded a round of major investment from Japanese SoftBank last year, making it the world’s most valuable startup.

TikTok’s rapid capture of India — it skyrocketed past traditional social media mammoths, like Facebook, on global download charts in 2018 — is a testament to how quickly Chinese apps have begun to give American tech companies a run for their money in one of the world’s most important markets. TikTok has given a megaphone to rural Indian life in a way that no other app has been able to; American apps such as Facebook have been restricted to a primarily upper-class user base.

“We believe that TikTok filled the gap by bringing people from across the deepest pockets of India online and giving them a platform to express themselves,” said ByteDance’s global public policy director Helena Lersch. Since the company introduced in-feed advertisements and branded editing tools last year, it’s attracted the likes of Pepsi, Myntra, and Dunzo.

If more proof were needed that TikTok has planted itself into the circuitry of desire and aspiration, it came by way of a news report last fortnight. A young man in Delhi, who worked at a restaurant, was arrested for snatching an iPhone XS Max — he wanted to shoot good-quality TikTok videos. Another 19-year-old from Delhi, Salman Zakir, was shot by his neighbour allegedly in the course of making a TikTok video.

But what is the big deal about TikTok? How have 15-second fragments of people being people colonised the attention of so many? Scrolling through the app for the first time, one is struck by how random it is, and how the attention economy has shrunk your mindspan to a quarter of a minute. You could easily tire of teens dancing, making faces and lip-synching in super-tiny skits and video memes. Or, you could watch an entire generation occupy this playground with their energy and creativity, using 15 seconds to mix, mash and play versions of themselves. Preparing a face to meet other excited, silly faces has never been so addictive.

Social media has put the self at the centre, making opinions out of rants, photographers of anyone with a phone camera, and journalists of citizens. TikTok takes the humdrum, turns it into a form of talent and injects into it the velocity of the fast-travelling video.

But, more importantly perhaps, it taps into a confidence in the young — about their lives, abilities and even their humble backgrounds — that was unthinkable a generation ago.

For sure, TikTok could not have spread this way five years ago either. Eighteen-year-old Devanshu Mahajan, an undergraduate student of commerce at Delhi University’s School of Open Learning, agrees. He found himself exploring the internet only after the entry of Reliance Jio in the telecom market. “Before that we used to have 1 GB data for a month. Suddenly, we had 1 GB to spend in a day,” says the Delhi resident. Last year, he started posting videos on TikTok, most of which seemed to disappear into nowhere. “I got so angry that I uploaded a rant about the lack of response, and suddenly it got viral. Then, I started giving my own twist to trending sounds/beats and songs, and these videos started becoming popular,” says Mahajan, who has over eight lakh followers now.

Most of his popular posts are about Indian families (“Indian parents wish for boys only to send them to the market to buy milk and vegetables endless times”), school life and being single. They are not particularly witty, but belong to the tradition of native humour that once would make judges mysteriously ROFL on shows like The Great Indian Laughter Challenge. “I make my videos at home, I have no tripod or light, there is one window where I put my phone and act,” says Mahajan, who uses an Mi Y3 phone. With a spiky haircut and a lean frame, he is the picture of ordinariness. “People either say I’m too thin, or comment about my nose or looks. But I make a story out of those comments too. If I can make fun of myself, nothing can affect me,” he says.

“It may not be like YouTube where one can earn money, but because of this app, I feel like a star now,” says Musaib Bashir Bhat, 27. He joined TikTok seven months ago and his 300 videos in Kashmiri have earned him 73,000 followers already. He is also recognised on the streets of Srinagar.

Fame is the drug that drives TikTok users, but, for now, at least, this is a following rooted in the local. The app is a Babel of many tongues, and each region has its distinct self-expression — in its aesthetic, looks or music. It hasn’t been monopolised by Hindi film music or Punjabi pop.

Ranjan Barman, an 18-year-old living in a small village in Lakhimpur, Assam, loves acting. “I know I can’t be an actor in real life— but at least on TikTok I can,” says the college-goer who joined the app four months ago. He is now nearing his one millionth heart — a commendable feat for someone who is new to the TikTok universe. His popularity, he suspects, could have something to do with the props he uses in his videos. Barman owns 22 gamusa shirts, or shirts fashioned out of the traditional Assamese cloth, and says that whenever he wears them, his videos get more play. “In Assam, people respect the gamusa. It touches sentiments,” he says.

But how substantial is this fame? What kind of recognition do TikTokers seek? Last month, Mahajan called for a meet-and-greet with his “fans” at a west Delhi mall. Thirty people showed up. “I hadn’t expected anyone to turn up. People clicked photos and videos, but I didn’t feel like a celebrity,” he says.

While TikTok fame comes from the number of followers one has, an important barometer is also the number of hearts you receive. For example, Medhi has only 4,000 followers, but his videos have received 74,500 hearts. The heart tally is an aggregate of the number of likes the creator has garnered across every video he has uploaded. “It is just one viral video you need — and then you are set,” says Medhi, who hasn’t hit the jackpot yet, but is optimistic. “Like all things in life, this, too, takes time,” he says.

TikTok has given Aizawl’s Adeline Pach much more than the 5,12,000 followers one sees on her profile. A cancer-survivor, Pach started using it in 2015, when it went by the name Musical.ly, while recovering from her illness. “It was silly, goofy stuff — but it helped take my mind off things,” she says. Even today, she suffers from a number of health issues. But TikTok “distracts her”.

Pach’s skilful “transition” videos (where one frame would blend to another seamlessly), started getting featured on the app’s homepage. “People liked the way I edited my videos. For example, if I was saying and wearing something in one frame, the next would be in another location, with me doing something else in another outfit,” says Pach, adding that earlier TikTok was more about skill, and now people “blindly heart goofy content.”

As Pach, now in her late twenties, kept getting featured, her followers shot up — and for first time in her life, the introvert found herself interacting with people — “and enjoying it. It gave me the confidence I never had.”

In 2017, Pach attended her first TikTok meetup in Mumbai. “That had about 70 people but the next one which took place in Bengaluru had 600,” she says. She performed a rap song by Nicki Minaj in front of a packed auditorium. “Suddenly I was fearless.”

For many, TikTok holds out the hope of bigger things to come — a career in music and acting. When he was a teen, Ambish KB’s acting talents — he mimicked his teachers’ mannerisms and got them to laugh — made him almost famous in school. In college, his obsession with films would make him watch first-day, first-show releases of leading Malayalam superstars like Mammootty and Mohanlal. He also held positions in the Ernakulam district unit of the all-Kerala Mammootty fans association. “It’s safe to assume that I spent more time in theatres than in college,” says Ambish, 27, an accountant with a fashion design firm in Kochi.

He still has not given up on his acting dreams. For three years now, he has been scouring for small roles, approaching directors, producers and scriptwriters, even as he maintains a job on the side. Not surprisingly, he has taken to TikTok like a duck to water. His account doesn’t boast an envious number of followers (572 at last count) but his videos, most of which are comedy re-enactments of popular scenes from Malayalam cinema, have collected thousands of views and a flood of reactions. He says his videos are all home-produced and mostly filmed in the dead of night once his parents are fast asleep. Many of them are also collaborations with his wife; she’s not mad about cinema like he is, but she likes the fun interface of TikTok. To the point that, at weddings, their relatives call them, “Oh look, here come the TikTok people!”

But more than anything, Ambish believes TikTok could hold his ticket to the film industry. “It’s a medium for people like us to display our talent. Who knows, if my video goes viral and if a casting director happens to notice, I might click,” says Ambish, who spends at least eight hours a day on TikTok. His inspiration is a fellow TikTok user, Fukru, who supposedly landed a role in a film after his dance videos went viral. “He would post videos every day, just random ones of him dancing. Now he’s got a role in the next film by director Omar Lulu. You never know,” Ambish says.

Ambish is not prepared to leave his job yet, as he understands the film industry is unpredictable. He doesn’t have the means to travel for auditions to faraway towns. But he knows he has a powerful device at his disposal that could get him there: his Huawei P20 Lite smartphone and the TikTok app on it.

While future sociologists might mine TikTok to understand the changing mores of a new generation, fears of data mining and privacy intrusions of the app have often been voiced. This year, the US Federal Trade Commission fined the company $5.7 million for illegally collecting the personal data of children. In 2018, Indonesia’s government temporarily banned the platform for “negative”, mostly pornographic and blasphemous, content. The government lifted the ban after the company complied with local laws and stepped up local content moderation.

In April, the Madras High Court made a similar interim takedown order, asking Google and Apple to remove TikTok from their app stores, citing pornographic and child exploitation content. Three weeks later, the court lifted the ban after the Supreme Court asked it to address the company’s plea against the takedown, and the app fell from most downloaded to fourth most in India. The company has admittedly decided to “show less skin” here than its other markets. “It’s a bit of a case-to-case basis. There is no clear line I can share with you now. If there is a sexually-explicit video, we take it down. And we are doing this a bit quicker in India,” said Lersch.

Writing in these pages, our columnist Nishant Shah warned about TikTok’s “embrace of artificial intelligence and big data analytics.” “From the minute you sign up for it, giving up your personal information and data to extreme mining which bears the same pitfalls of privacy and surveillance that all other big data apps do, TikTok starts presenting content to you. This is not content created by friends, or colleagues… Instead, this is content created by people you don’t know at all, and brought to you by algorithms that know, even without you telling them what you might like.

The more time you spend … going through complex tutorials to make your own 15-second fun video, the more the machine learning algorithms learn you,” wrote the co-founder of the Centre for Internet and Society. While critics point out that the infantilised world that the app peddles is dangerous to the very personal liberty that it seems to showcase, it’s not an argument that is winning.

But wait, what happened to the “meatup” banner? When Medhi and Nath had met, they rued the little regard their family and friends had for their pursuit. “My friends think I am wasting time,” says Medhi, the only TikToker in Raha. Both knew they had to do something.

They went ahead and organised the first state-wide TikTok meetup in Assam, slated for this Sunday. While there have been meetups before, this is the first time TikTokers from every corner of the state will be in attendance. They expect about 500. How did they manage to do it? “Only negative things go viral on the internet,” says Medhi, “That is why we decided to spell ‘meetup’ as ‘meatup’.”

The day the banner was ready and picked up from Nagaon, both Medhi and Nath took a picture of it and put it on the app. As expected, there was an uproar. “Everyone started sharing it. My phone number was on the banner and I would get 10 calls a day. “They would say: Don’t you know how to spell ‘meetup’? Most made fun of me but I didn’t care. Our job was done. The word had spread.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/indian-express-june-23-2019-chasing-fame-and-fun-15-seconds-at-a-time

The Global Nature of Cybersecurity in a Changing World

Admin — 2019-07-05T02:26:52Z

Arindrajit Basu represented CIS at the annual grantee convening of the Hewlett Foundation held at San Diego from 20 - 22 June 2019.

Cybersecurity knows no borders and is not limited to any one geography or culture. The challenges and opportunities facing cybersecurity experts, policymakers and the public areglobal in nature and require globally-minded solutions at all levels. At the same time, rapid changes in technology have a direct impact on societies around the world and the changingthreat environment. The Hewlett Foundation’s 2019 Cyber Initiative Grantee Convening will focus on two pillars: (1) the global nature of cyberspace and (2) emerging technologychallenges and solutions. We will come together to share our work in this space and identify opportunities for meaningful collaboration.

For more info, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/news/the-global-nature-of-cybersecurity-in-a-changing-world

Facebook to pay Indians to give up privacy: Experts raise questions

Geetika Mantri — 2019-06-22T04:01:26Z

Facebook has launched a voluntary, opt-in program, which monetarily compensates users in exchange for their data.

The blog post by Geetika Mantri was published in the Newsminute on June 14, 2019. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

On June 11, 2019, Facebook announced ‘Study,’ its market research app for Android users in US and India, which pays users who allow it to monitor how they use the applications on their phone.

The Study app will collect data on the apps installed on a participant’s phone, the amount of time spent using those apps, the participant’s country, device and network type and app activity names, which may show Facebook the names of app features the participants are using. It promises not to collect user IDs, passwords, or any of the participant’s content, such as photos, videos or messages and has assured that the information will neither be sold to third parties nor used to target ads. Facebook says it also won’t add the data collected to the user’s Facebook account if they have one. Read more about it here.

It’s clear that this is a voluntary, opt-in program, which monetarily compensates users in exchange for them giving up some of their privacy. A Facebook spokesperson told TNM that the payments will be made on a monthly basis through PayPal, but the amount and the rate were not disclosed. “Our partner, Applause, will handle all compensation,” Facebook said.

And while experts point out that Facebook is certainly not the first company that wants to do market research by collecting user data, the new proposal raises some pertinent questions about privacy and consent.

Not illegal, but what’s the end goal?

“It is clear that market research apps invade people’s privacy,” states Pranesh Prakash, a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society. “However, asking people to opt-in for market research is not uncommon. And if consent is given, it is legal. There is nothing wrong with people participating in this as long as they are aware.”

That being said, Pranesh also points out that in many cases, market research such as this has led to useful insights about user behaviour and can contribute to public policy as well. However, in Facebook’s case, it is likely that the findings will be used internally and will not be made public.

When asked about the purpose of this data collection, Facebook said it was to make better products.

“Like many companies, we use market research to help us understand trends and build better products. This information is incredibly important to us because knowing how people use apps helps us prioritise and build better experiences for people,” a Facebook spokesperson said, adding that they are maintaining complete transparency.

No strong data privacy laws in India

While there is a requirement for participants to consent to share data with Study app, what makes Indian users vulnerable is that the country does not strong data privacy laws. The Data Privacy Bill 2018, modelled on the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) of the European Union, is yet to become a law and is riddled with loopholes in its present form.

Nitish Chandan, a cyber-security specialist, points out that though the Supreme Court deemed privacy a fundamental right of Indian citizens last year, the jurisprudence itself has not evolved – no major company or entity has been punished so far for a data breach.

“Had the Data Protection Bill been passed, there would have been a clear mandate for companies who want to process personal data as well as purpose limitation, meaning they can only process data for certain purposes and not others,” Nitish says.

And while the data collection is legal because consent is obtained, Nitish points out a strong data protection law would have barred from it being used for unethical purposes such as mass profiling. The Data Protection Bill for instance, under section 33 (1), bars large-scale profiling or any processing which carries the risk of “significant harm to data principles” unless the data fiduciary undertakes a data protection impact assessment in India.

Further, while purpose limitation breaches can be picked up by watchdogs, common people are unlikely to realise this and read the fine print, Nitish adds.

What conditions is consent being sought in?

Nayantara R, Programme Manager–Freedom of Expression at the Internet Democracy Project, tells TNM that Facebook’s decision to launch Study raises some very important questions.

"With calls for informed consent while giving away data, something like Study seems to satisfy many requirements. The app will clearly state what data is collected when a user opens it, etc. But the problem is approaching consent in an individualised manner, without questioning if there are structural conditions that enable giving consent. A useful parallel to draw is conversations on consent in the context of sexual relations. We question the power dynamics and surrounding circumstances in the giving of consent there. The Study app is a good case to confront what is the kind of consent we are after," she explains.

Nayantara argues that consent has to be situated in the larger ecosystem of power play. The situation is made complex by the monetary incentive. If a person needs the money and therefore consents to give up their privacy to a large company – how freely is that consent given? And is it a fair trade?

“These questions don’t have easy answers but are the conversations that we need to start having,” Nayantara states. “This is not so much about whether Facebook's motives are bad. The more important question it raises is about the demands that civil society has been making: consent, compensation in exchange for the labour on platforms etc,” she observes.

The Facebook spokesperson’s response indicated that the company has been aware of these debates and demands: “We’ve learned that what people expect when they sign up to participate in market research has changed and we’ve built this app to match those expectations.”

Not Facebook’s first time collecting data

This is not the first time that Facebook has launched an app for market research – its now-defunct Research app, launched in 2016, was rolled back after an investigation by Tech Crunch that revealed the app had violated Apple’s policies. The app had asked users to download a VPN onto their devices, ‘trust’ it (requiring users to give it permission), and could, if it wanted, access personal information of users, including private messages on social media apps, chats from instant messaging apps (inclusive of photos and videos), emails, web browsing history and even the present location of the person, by tapping into another app using the location feature.

This app – that also paid users up to $20 per month in gift cards to share their data – came under even more fire because it didn’t just target adults. People from age 13 to age 35 were eligible to download this app. Investigations also revealed that Facebook had ended up collecting some non-targeted data as well.

Additionally, it also bought the Onavo Protect app in 2014, which projected itself as a privacy app providing free VPN to users and allowing them to minimise their data plan usage. However, the app was collecting information on users, providing Facebook with deep analytics about which apps the users were using. The app was eventually discontinued after the data snooping was discovered.

Facebook seems to have learnt from these experiences. “We’re offering transparency, compensating all participants and keeping people’s information safe and secure,” a company spokesperson said. However, Tech Crunch reportedthat Study – which is only for users above the age of 18 – too could give Facebook crucial insights into competitors and features it could invest in on its own platforms based on what was popular on other apps users are using.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/geetika-mantri-june-14-2019-the-news-minute-facebook-to-pay-indians-to-give-up-privacy

ICANN Masterclass

Admin — 2019-06-22T03:57:07Z

ICANN organized a masterclass in Bangalore on June 19, 2019.

It was ICANN's first-ever such initiative within civil society to inform and spread awareness about their functioning. The workshop was conducted by Mary Wong who is the Vice President for Strategic Comunications Operations, Planning and Engagement and is a member of the Policy Team performing global policy development work. She was joined by Samiran Gupta who is the Head of India for ICANN. He is the primary representative of ICANN in the country and responsible for all stakeholder engagements here.

Agenda

10.00 a.m. - 11.45 a.m.: Introduction to ICANN and the role of ICANN Org to facilitate the community’s work
10.45 a.m. - 12.00: Tea break
12.00 - 1.30 p.m.: ICANN’s Policy Development Process (will be conducted in an interactive mode to simulate a Policy Development Process working group meeting).
1.30 p.m - 2.30 p.m.: Lunch
2.30 p.m - 3.30 p.m.: The role of Governmental Advisory Committee (India’s GAC-related engagement in specific terms).
3.30 p.m. - 3.45 p.m.: Tea break
3.45 p.m - 4.30 p.m.: Open Q&A session.(Also open so that in case prior segments over-run, we still have some time on hand to complete the agenda comfortably).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/icann-masterclass