We are anonymous, we are legion

Beyond Public Squares, Dumb Conduits, and Gatekeepers: The Need for a New Legal Metaphor for Social Media

amber — 2021-05-31T10:19:33Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/beyond-public-squares-dumb-conduits-and-gatekeepers.pdf

Beyond Public Squares, Dumb Conduits, and Gatekeepers: The Need for a New Legal Metaphor for Social Media

amber — 2021-05-31T10:23:36Z

In the past few years, social networking sites have come to play a central role in intermediating the public’s access to and deliberation of information critical to a thriving democracy. In stark contrast to early utopian visions which imagined that the internet would create a more informed public, facilitate citizen-led engagement, and democratize media, what we see now is the growing association of social media platforms with political polarization and the entrenchment of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia.

There is a dire need to think of regulatory strategies that look beyond the ‘dumb conduit’ metaphors that justify safe harbor protection to social networking sites. Alongside, it is also important to critically analyze the outcomes of regulatory steps such that they do not adversely impact free speech and privacy. By surveying the potential analogies of company towns, common carriers, and editorial functions, this essay provides a blueprint for how we may envision differentiated intermediary liability rules to govern social networking sites in a responsive manner.

Introduction

Only months after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory — a feat mired in controversy over alleged Russian interference using social media, specifically Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg remarked that his company has grown to serve a role more akin to government, rather than a corporation. Zuckerberg argued that Facebook was responsible for creating guidelines and rules that governed the exchange of ideas of over two billion people online. Another way to look at the same argument is to acknowledge that, today, a quarter of the world’s population (and of India) are subject to the laws of Facebook’s terms and conditions and privacy policies, and public discourse around the globe is shaped within the constraints and conditions they create. Social media platforms, like Facebook, wield hitherto unimaginable power to catalyze public opinions, causing a particular narrative to gather steam — that Big Tech can pose an existential threat to democracy.

This, of course, is in absolute contrast to the early utopian visions which imagined that the internet would create a more informed public, facilitate citizen-led engagement, and democratize media. Instead, what we see now is the growing association of social media platforms with political polarization and the entrenchment of racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. The regulation of social networking sites has emerged as one of the most important and complex policy problems of this time. In this essay, I will explore the inefficacy of the existing regulatory framework, and provide a blueprint for how to think of appropriate regulatory metaphors to revisit it.

Click on to read the article published by IT for Change
Download the PDF (34,328 Kb) to read the full article, pages 126 - 138.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/it-for-change-amber-sinha-beyond-public-squares-dumb-conduits-and-gatekeepers

Beyond Clicktivism

praskrishna — 2011-04-20T04:33:53Z

Moral support Hazare has in plenty. Count the missed calls, writes Debarshi Dasgupta in this article published in the Outlook on April 18, 2011.

Want to commit sedition against the government?” “Join Dandi March-II.” “A Mahatma announces a fast-unto-death.” These were some of the clarion calls that organisers of the protest against corruption led by Anna Hazare were making online. And people from all classes responded in massive numbers. Possibly fed up with the scale of the CWG and 2G scams and exasperated by the petty and mundane corruption they encounter daily.

Anna Hazare and Jantar Mantar were among the top 10 global trending topics on Twitter on April 7 afternoon. “Earthquake named Anna Hazare lashes on corrupted Indian Politicians, epicenter India, it measures 1.22 Billion Richter Hearts,” said one. A disengaged youngster tweeted: “OK, enough of ignorance...time to read up on Anna Hazare.” On the ‘India Against Corruption’ page on Facebook, people from across the country left posts either announcing their local programme to support Hazare or asking for advice to organise one. Leaflets urged people to give a missed call on a Mumbai landline expressing support. With 6,00,000 missed calls, the organisers were urging more to call in to take that number to over 25 lakh.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, said the organisers of this social media campaign had adopted a “funnel approach”, in which they get people involved gradually. “Clicking on the ‘Like’ function on Facebook to making a call—they are increasing the action, incrementally getting people to become proper activists from being armchair slacktivists.”

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/beyond-clicktivism

Beyond Anonymous: Shit people say on Internet piracy

nishant — 2012-06-13T14:01:59Z

This post is a series of provocations around piracy, censorship and the state of Internet in India. Like all good tasting things, these observations need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But it is the hope of the author that this serves as a response to otherwise very persistent voices that have been demonizing file-sharing online.

Firstpost published Nishant Shah's column along with the video that CIS and ALF had made on 'shit people say about piracy' as a lead story on June 7, 2012.

9 June is going to be a big day in India, for all concerned with internet regulation, censorship and the current attacks on file-sharing.

The International Hacker group Anonymous – a group that has become iconic with its members wearing Guy Fawkes mask as they mobilise protest and hacker attacks on what they see as tyrannical regimes – has called for marched protests in 16 Indian cities, to demand a free and open Internet.

They have already started launching Denial of Service attacks and taking down websites owned by the Indian government to express their displeasure about the recent regulation of the internet. Whether or not their guerrilla tactics are efficient and effective, in the right or not, is something that has been discussed quite popularly.

There are hordes of people who think of them as the NewAge Mutant Ninja Hackers, who are protecting our digital worlds from being clamped down. There are others who paint them as the Big Bad Wolf who huffed and puffed and will blow our houses away.

You might be sympathetic, suspicious or scared of the emergence of such a ‘crowd vigilante’, sporting the slogan that has spawned Internet memes galore – Y U No Wake up? – But there is no doubt that the rise of such a collective signals how discourse around piracy, rights, and openness is no longer in the domain of the uber-geek and the academic researcher.

These are concepts with very material realities that affect our everyday functioning and require not only better policies but also a more nuanced public discourse. Today, I look at some of the most ludicrous things that have been said about file-sharing, around the world, wondering why this idea of sharing has evoked such startling responses from different quarters.

File sharing and depression: There has always been a concern about the physical well-being of internet users. From Internet addiction rehabilitation clinics in China to online support groups for internet addicts (I swear I am not making this up!), from doctors worried about posture and eye-sight to mothers concerned about violent video games, we thought we had heard it all.

And then came the extraordinary study that suggested that file sharing might lead to depression. Or rather, if you are an avid file-sharer on the internet, you are prone to attacks of depression. This had the twitter world abuzz, where people were trying to make sense of this ‘scientific’ study that connected spending long hours on the interwebz with mental illness. A trending tweet just about summed up the situation, when it said, “File sharers are depressed only because of what is done to them when they share”.

File sharing and jobs: There was a time when the Music and Film Industry Associations (MAFIA) around the world used to protest file sharing by painting a romanticised picture of the independent starving artists, from whose mouths, we stole morsels, as we shared their work without paying for it. But that argument collapsed in the days of Napster (remember that?) and it has been proven over and over again, that the artist almost always benefits from their work being shared.

However, lately, research from respectable universities (expensively funded by respectable interested parties) have started hitting the real you, rather than the imagined artist. Every torrent being downloaded on the web is correlated with a lost job, because these companies can no longer afford to hire as many people as they used to, because of the growing losses. And then it goes into complicated mumbo-jumbo about how that one torrent that sits merrily on your computer, actually affects all the jobs to kingdom come and will be responsible for your children’s unemployment.

They remain silent about the jobs lost because of the funding that went into buying supporting this research.

I am not a Pirate: And lest you go away with the idea that the rest of the junta does not gaff, here are some of the gems that have come our way while working with people in the field. It is common, for instance, for people to take a moral stance on piracy, radiating a holier-than-thou ethical persona, without realising that recording that last IPL match to watch later on your tablet is also an act of piracy.

Then there are those who only consume material pirated by others, happily ignoring the fact that the ring-tone that they copied from their friend is also an act of piracy. Ditto, people who claim “I am not a pirate”, meaning that they haven’t yet figured out the bittorrent system and hence go to the local corner shop to buy pirated DVDs of the latest releases. In their heads, they have paid somebody for the material and hence it must be alright.

Piracy is not a one-point source process. It is a networked ecosystem, and I am still to find that one person who has never shared anything and make a video of them saying “I am not a pirate”. But that is probably just wishful thinking.

There are many more such instances which make your mind boggle and your eyes goggle and you wonder if you heard it right for the first time. Do share your favourite ones if you can. In the meantime you might also want to look at the new meme video ‘Sh!t People say about Piracy’ that captures some of these responses in their absurdity.

Video

(Video by The Centre for Internet and Society , and the Alternative Law Forum)

Follow the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/shit-people-say-on-internet-piracy

Beyond Access as Inclusion

anja — 2011-08-02T07:29:03Z

On 13 September, the day before the fifth Internet Governance Forum opens, CIS is coorganising in Vilnius a meeting on Internet governance and human rights. One of the main aims of this meeting is to call attention to the crucial, yet in Internet governance often neglected, indivisibility of rights. In this blog post, Anja Kovacs uses this lens to illustrate how it can broaden as well reinvigorate our understanding of what remains one of the most pressing issues in Internet governance in developing countries to this day: that of access to the Internet.

One of the most attractive characteristics of the Internet – and perhaps also one of the most debated ones – is its empowering, democratising potential. In expositions in favour of access to the Internet for all, this potential certainly often plays a central role: as the Internet can help us to make our societies more open, more inclusive, and more democratic, everybody should be able to reap the fruits of this technology, it is argued. In other words, in debates on access to the Internet, most of us take as our starting point the desirability of such access, for the above reasons. But how justified is such a stance? Is an Internet-induced democratic transformation of our societies what is actually happening on the ground?

I would like to move away, in this blog post, from the more traditional approaches to the issue of access, where debates mostly veer towards issues of infrastructure (spectrum, backbones, last mile connectivity, …) or, under the banner of “diversity”, towards the needs of specific, disadvantaged communities (especially linguistic minorities and the disabled). To remind us more sharply of the issues at stake and of the wide range of human rights that need our active attention to make our dreams a reality, I would like to take a step back and to ask two fundamental questions regarding access: why might access be important? And what do we actually have access to?

Let me start, then, by exploring the first question: why, actually, is Internet access important? In his canonical work on the information age, and especially in the first volume on the rise of the network society, Manuel Castells (2000) has perhaps provided the most elaborate and erudite description of the ways in which new technologies are restructuring our societies and our lives. We are all all too familiar with the many and deep-seated ways in which the Internet changes the manner in which we learn, play, court, pay, do business, maintain relationships, dream, campaign. And yet, the exact nature of the divide created by the unequal distribution of technical infrastructure and access, despite being so very real, receives relatively little attention: this divide is not simply one of opportunities, it is crucially one of power. If in traditional Marxist analysis the problem was that the oppressed did not have access to the means of production, today, one could well argue, the problem is that they do not have access to the means of communication and information.

Indeed, the Internet is not something that is simply happening to us: there are people who are responsible for these new evolutions. And so it becomes important to ask: who is shaping the Internet? Who is creating this new world? Let us, by way of example, consider some figures relating to Internet use in India. So often hailed as the emerging IT superpower of the world, there are, by the end of 2009, according to official government figures, in this country of 1 billion 250 million people slightly more than 15 million Internet connections. Of these, only slightly more than half, or almost 8 million, are broadband connections – the rest are still dial-up ones (TRAI 2010). The number of Internet users is of course higher – one survey estimates that there are between 52 million and 71 million Internet users in urban areas, where the bulk of users is still located (IAMAI 2010). But while this is a considerable number, it remains a fraction of the population in a country so big. What these figures put in stark relief, then, is that the poor and marginalised are not so much excluded from the information society (in fact, many have to bear the consequences of new evolutions made possible by it in rather excruciating fashion), but rather, that they are fundamentally excluded from shaping the critical ways in which our societies are being transformed.

To have at least the possibility to access the Internet is, then, of central significance in this context for the possibility of participation it signals in the restructuring of our societies at the community, national and global level, and this in two ways: in the creation of visions of where our societies should be going, and in the actual shaping of the architecture of our societies in the information age.

If we agree that access attains great significance in this sense, then a second question poses itself, and that is: in practice, what exactly are we getting access to? This query should be of concern to all of us. With the increasing corporatisation of the Internet and the seemingly growing urges of governments on all continents to survey and control their citizens, new challenges are thrown up of how to nurture the growth of open, inclusive, democratic societies, that all of us are required to take an interest in.

Yet it is in the case of poor and marginalised people that the challenges are most pronounced. Efforts to include them in the information society are disproportionately legitimised on the basis of the contribution these can make to improving their livelihoods. Initiatives, often using mobile technology, that allow farmers to get immediate information about the market prices of the produce they are intending to sell, are perhaps the most well-known and oft-cited examples in this category. Other efforts aim to improve the information flow from the government to citizens: India has set up an ambitious network of Common Service Centres, for example, that aim to greatly facilitate the access of citizens to particular government services, such as obtaining birth or caste certificates – and going by first indications, this also seems to be succeeding in practice. Only rarely, however, do initiatives to “include” the poor in the information society address them as holistic beings who do not only have economic lives, but political, emotional, creative and intellectual existences as well. This is not to say that economic issues are not of importance. But by highlighting only this aspect of poor people's lives, we promote a highly impoverished understanding of their existences.

The focus on a limited aspect of the poor's identity - important as that aspect may be - has a function, however: it makes it possible to hide from view the extremely restrictive terms on which poor people are currently being integrated into the information society. Even initiatives such as the Common Service Centres are in fact based on a public-private-partnership model that explicitly aims to “align [..] social and commercial goals” (DIT 2006: 1), and in effect subordinates government service design to the requirements of the CSC business model (Singh 2008). The point is not simply that we need strong privacy and data protection policies in such a context – although we clearly do. There is a larger issue here, which is that efforts to include the poor in the information society, in the present circumstances, really seem to simply integrate them more closely into a capitalist system over which they have little control, or to submit them to ever greater levels of government and corporate surveillance. Their own capacity to give shape to the system in which they are “included”, despite the oft-heralded capacities of the Internet to allow greater democratic participation and to turn everybody into a producer and distributor, as well as a consumer, remains extremely limited.

Such tendencies have not gone unnoticed. For example, unlike in many other parts of the world, social movements in India fighting against dams, special economic zones or mining operations in forest areas - all initiatives that lead to large-scale displacement – have not embraced technology as enthusiastically as one might have expected. There are various reasons for this. Within Indian nationalism, there have always been strands deeply critical of technology, with Gandhi perhaps their most illustrious proponent. But for many activists, technology often also already comes with an ideological baggage: an application such as Twitter, for example, in so many of its aspects is clearly manufactured by others, for others, drawing on value sets that activists often in many ways are reluctant to embrace. And such connotations only gain greater validity because of the intimate connections that exist in India between the IT boom and neoliberalism: technology has great responsibility for many of the trends and practices these activists are fighting against. While the Internet might have made possible many new publics, most movements do not – as movements – recognise these publics as their own (Kovacs, forthcoming).

To some extent, these are of course questions of the extent of access that people are granted. But they also raise the important issue of the value structure of the Internet. Efforts at inclusion always take for granted a standard that is already set. But what if the needs and desires of the many billions that still need to be included are not served by the Internet as it exists? What if, for it to really work for them, they need to be able to make the Internet a different place than the one we know today? While it is obvious that different people will give different answers in different parts of the world, such debates are complicated tremendously by the fact that it is no longer sufficient to reach a national consensus on the issues under discussion, as was the case in earlier eras. The global nature of the Internet's infrastructure requires that the possibility of differing opinions, too, needs to be facilitated at the global level. What are the consequences of this for the development of democracy?

For access to the Internet to be substantively meaningful from a human rights perspective in the information age, it is crucial, then, that at a minimum, the openness of the Internet is ensured at all levels. Of course, openness can be considered a value in itself. But perhaps more importantly, at the moment, it is the only way in which the possibility of a variety of answers to the pressing question of what shape our societies should take in the information age can emerge. Open standards and the portability of data, for example, are crucial if societies are to continue to decide on the role corporations should play in their public life, rather than having corporations de facto rule the roost. Similarly, under no circumstances should anyone be cut off from the Internet, if people are to participate in the public life of the societies of which they are members. And these are not just concerns for developing countries: if recent incidents from France to Australia are anything to go by, new possibilities facilitated by the Internet have, at least at the level of governments, formed the impetus for a clear shift to the right of the political spectrum in many developed countries. In the developed world, too, the questions of access and what it allows for are thus issues that should concern all. In the information age, human rights will only be respected if such respect is already inscribed in the very architecture of its central infrastructure itself.

List of References

Castells, Manuel (2000). The Rise of the Network Society, 2^nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Department of Information Technology (DIT) (2006). Guidelines for the Implementation of Common Services Centers (CSCs) Scheme in States. New Delhi: Department of Information Technology, Government of India.

Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) (2010). I-Cube 2009-2010: Internet in India. Mumbai: Internet and Mobile Association of India.

Kovacs, Anja (forthcoming). Inquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India (working title). Bangalore: Centre for Internet and Society.

Singh, Parminder Jeet (2008). Recommendations for a Meaningful and Successful e-Governance in India. IT for Change Policy Brief, IT for Change, Bangalore.

Telecom Regulatory Auhority of India (TRAI) (2010). The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators, October-December 2009. New Delhi: Telecom Regulatory Auhority of India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/beyond-access-as-inclusion

Between the Local and the Global: Notes Towards Thinking the Nature of Internet Policy

nishant — 2014-04-04T03:49:14Z

This post by Nishant Shah is part of a series related to the 2014 Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy: The Third Man Theme Revisited: Foreign Policies of the Internet in a Time Of Surveillance and Disclosure, which takes place in Vienna, Austria from March 30 – April 1, 2014.

The 2014 seminar is jointly organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the American Austrian Foundation (AAF), and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna (DA). For more information visit the seminar webpage and Facebook Page. Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India.

Nishant Shah's post was published on April 1st, 2014 | by cgcsblog

An imagined and perceived gap between the global and the local informs transnational politics and internet policy. The global views the local as both the site upon which the global can manifest itself as well as the microcosm that supports and strengthens global visions by providing mutations, adaptations and reengineering of the governance practices. The local is encouraged to connect with the global through a series of outward facing practices and policies, thus producing two separate domains of preservation and change. On the one hand, the local, the organic and the traditional, needs to be preserved and make the transnational and the global the exotic other. On the other hand, the local also needs to be in a state of aspiration, transforming itself to belong to global networks of polity and policy that are deemed as desirable, especially for a development and rights based vision of societies.

While these negotiations and transactions are often fruitful and local, national, and transnational structures and mechanics have been developed to facilitate this flow, this relationship is precarious. There is an implicit recognition that the local and the transnational, dialectically produced, are often opaque categories and empty signifiers. They sustain themselves through unquestioned presumptions of particular attributes that are taken for granted in these interactions. There have been many different metaphors that have been used to understand and explain these complex transfers of knowledge and information, resources and capital, bodies and ideologies. Vectors, Flows, Disjunctures, Intersections are some of the examples. However, with the rise of the digital technologies and vocabularies, especially the internet, the metaphor of the Network with its distributed nodes has become one of the most potent explanations of contemporary politics. This idea of living in networked worlds is so seductive and ‘common-sense,’ that it has become an everyday practice to think of the global as a robust, never-ending, all-inclusive network where the local becomes an important node because it enables both connectivity within but also an expansion of the edges, in order to connect to that which is outside the traffic capacities of the network.

The ‘Network Society’ paradigm is distinct from earlier rubrics of information and open society that have informed existing information and communication policies. In this paradigm we have the opportunity to revisit and remap the ways in which local governments and populations function and how they produce locals who can feed into the transnational and global discourse. The network facilitates some knowledge that is valuable and allows us to map inequity and mal-distribution of resources by offering comparisons between the different nodes. Networks force our attention to the edges, the no-person’s-zone which is porous but still serves as an osmotic filter that often keeps the underprivileged and the unintelligible outside its fold. Networks as metaphors are valuable because they produce a cartographic vision of the world with multiple boundaries and layers, dealing with big data sets to create patterns that might otherwise be invisible. They enable the replication of models that can be further localised and adapted to fit the needs of the context. Networks make the world legible – we write it through the lens of the network, intelligible – we understand it through the language and vocabulary of the network, and accessible – it allows for knowledge and practices to transfer across geographies and times.

At the same time, networks are a vicious form of organisation because they work through the logic of resource maximisation, efficiency and optimisation, often disallowing voices of dissent that threaten the consensus making mechanisms of the network. Networks have a self-referential relationship with reality because they produce accounts of reality which can easily stand in for the material and the real. They are the new narratives that can operate with existing data sets and produce such rich insights for analysis that we forget to account for that which cannot be captured in the database structures of these data streams. Networks work through a principle of homogeneity and records, thus precluding forms of operation which cannot be easily quantified.

Given this complex nature of networks and the fact that they are emerging as the de facto explanations of not only social and cultural relationships but also economic and political transactions, it might be fruitful to approach the world of policy and politics, the local and the transnational, through the lens of the network. Building a critique of the network while also deploying the network as a way to account for the governmental practices might produce key insights into how the world operates. What does it mean to imagine the world in the image of the internet as a gigantic network? What are the ways in which a networked visualisation of policy and governmental processes can help us analyse and understand contemporary politics? What tools can we develop to expose the limitations of a network paradigm and look at more inclusive and sensitive models for public discourse and participation? How do we document events, people, and drivers of political change that often get overlooked in the networked imagination of transnational politics? These are the kind of questions that the Center for Global Communication Study’s Internet Policy Observatory (IPO) could initiate, building empirical, qualitative and historical research to understand the complex state of policy making and its relationship with enforcement, operationalization and localisation.

Given the scope and scale of these questions, there are a few specific directions that can be followed to ensure that research is focused and concentrated rather than too vague and generalised:

Bird’s eye views: The big picture understanding of transnational political and policy networks is still missing from our accounts of contemporary discourse. While global representative networks of multi-stakeholder dialogues have been established, there is not enough understanding of how they generate traffic (information, knowledge, data, people, policies) within the network through the different nodes. Producing an annotated and visual network map that looks at the different structural and organisational endeavours and presences, based on available open public data, bolstered by qualitative interviews would be very useful both as a research resource but also an analytic prototype to understand the complex relationships between the various stakeholders involved in processes of political change.
Crisis Mapping: One of the most important things within Network studies is how the network identifies and resolves crises. Crises are the moment when the internal flaws, the structural weaknesses, and the fragile infrastructure become visible. The digital network, like the internet, has specific mechanisms of protecting itself against crises. However, the appearance of a crisis becomes an exciting time to look at the discrepancy between the ambition of the network and its usage. A crisis is generally a symptom that shows the potentials for radical subversion, overthrowing, questioning and the abuse of network designs and visions. Locating ICT related crises with historical and geographical focuses could similarly reveal the discrepancies of the processes of making policy and orchestrating politics.
Longitudinal Studies: The network remains strong because it works through a prototype principle. Consequently, no matter how large the network is, it is possible to splice, slice, and separate a small component of the network for deep dive studies. This microcosm offers rich data sets, which can then be applied across the network to yield different results. Further, working with different actors – from individual to the collective, from the informal the institutional – but giving them all equal valency provides a more equal view of the roles, responsibilities, and aspirations of the different actors involved in the processes. This kind of a longitudinal study, working on very small case-studies and then applying them to analyse the larger social and political conditions help in understanding the transnational and global processes in a new way.

These research based inquiries could result in many different outputs based on the key users that they are working with and for. The methods could be hybrid, using existing local and experimental structures, with predefined criteria for rigour and robustness. The research, given its nature, would necessitate working with existing networks and expanding them, thus building strong and sustainable knowledge networks that can be diverted towards intervention through capacity building and pedagogy directed at the different actors identified within these nodes.

Dr. Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Germany and a Knowledge Partner with the Hivos Knowledge Programme, The Netherlands. In these varied roles, he has been committed to producing infrastructure, frameworks and collaborations in the global south to understand and analyse the ways in which emergence and growth of digital technologies have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural milieu. He is the editor for a series of monographs on ‘Histories of Internet(s) in India’ that looks at the complicated relationship that technologies have with questions of gender, sexuality, body, city, governance, archiving and gaming in a country like India. He is also the principle researcher for a research programme that produced the four-volume anthology ‘Digital AlterNatives With a Cause?’ that examines the ways in which young people’s relationship with digital technologies produces changes in their immediate environments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cgcs-nishant-shah-april-1-2014-between-the-local-and-the-global

Best Practices Meet

praskrishna — 2014-08-06T06:25:20Z

The Best Practices Meet 2014 is being organized by DSCI at Hotel Leela Palace on July 9, 2014. Sunil Abraham will participate as a panelist at the event.

SMAC: new paradigm for Security?

Convergence of Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud, is collectively referred as SMAC technologies. The success of social media products and sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin many more has been driving organizations’ investment in social computing. Mobile is another example of how technologies invented initially for personal use, entrenched itself into the enterprise ecosystem. Social computing and mobile blurs the boundaries between personal, social and business transactions. They lead to the explosion of information, which provides interesting insights, critical for business benefits. This reflects in huge impetus that has been seen in analytics, widely known as Big Data analytics. On the other hand, cloud brings completely new paradigm of organizing entperise IT, developing new products and services and delivering consumer experiences.

Increasing adoption of SMAC stack by enterprises breaks the existing paradigm of security. The data explosion on mobile devices exposes organizations’ information to inadvertent loss of revenue and brand value. Malicious applications may steal vital information stored on an employee’s mobile device and pave the way for a major data breach. Web application attacks remain the most significant threat for environments of cloud-hosting providers, amongst other apprehensions about data security. Data sovereignty also continue to pose serious concerns, which organizations need to tackle while moving their data to the cloud. Big data facilitates advanced analytics; however, requires protection from intrusion, corruption and securing its access. Furthermore, social media platforms are continuously exploited to launch malicious content and stealthy payload on devices. Social technologies are also plagued by the use of malicious techniques to mine confidential personal information under the guise of innocuous looking web pages via social engineering techniques.

Apart from security concerns, privacy supposed to be a big causality, as each component of the SMAC stack is considered intrusive enough to compromise the personal rights. Convergence and nexus of them add to the woes.

The collaborative and cumulative effect of all of these technologies working in unison essentially magnifies the efforts of the organizations that are able to wield them effectively. This evolution is challenging the ability of current security capabilities to address business critical risks. The way forward for organizations would be to understand the perspective of end users and IT infrastructure in terms of its integration with any or all the elements of SMAC. The organizations will have to deal with the new paradigm of security that will take them to more scalable, granualar, complex, independent and diverse challenges.

The DSCI Best Practices Meet, 2014 brings the security community and other stakeholders together, to deliberate and ponder over these diverse set of issues and challenges. It is aimed at deliberating on the new security paradigm from the perspectives of public policy, enterprise strategies, technology and practices.

Click to download the agenda and other details here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/best-practices-meet-2014

Best Bits 2012

praskrishna — 2012-12-06T06:46:17Z

Best Bits organized a workshop at the IGF. It was held on November 3 and 4, 2012. Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok participated in the event.

Agenda

Day 1, Saturday, November 3, 2012

9.00 - 10.45	Internet governance history and review Mapping Internet governance – institutions and actors Last 20 years of Internet governance: ITU, ISOC, WSIS and IGF Last 2 years – ACTA, SOPA/PIPA and online activism eg. StopTheMeter.ca, government assertions of sovereignty over IG Southern perspectives on global Internet governance
11.00 - 12.45	The ITU and the International Telecommunications Regulations What are the real dangers of the proposed ITR revisions? Remaining opportunities for input into the WCIT process How to engage with your national delegation to the ITU Beyond WCIT – WTPF, WTSA, IMPACT, and the Dedicated Group
12.45 - 14.00	Lunch and networking break
12.00 - 17.30	Drafting a civil society statement to WCIT Draws together points of consensus Defines the legitimate role of the ITU Judges it against the WSIS criteria Refers to statement on IG principles

Day 2, Sunday, November 4, 2012

9.00 - 10.30	Declarations of Internet rights and Internet governance principles Background to Internet principles declarations 1999 to 2012 Declaration of Internet Freedom – first and second iterations Other current initiatives – “rival” Declaration, Marco Civil, etc. Respective advantages of consolidation and maintaining diversity
10.45 - 12.15	Process towards enhanced cooperation on Internet public policy issues If not the ITU, then what? The global vacuum on Internet-related public policy issues Likely scenarios (favourable or not) if the vacuum is not filled Discussion of reform proposals – Committee on Internet Related Policies, Enhanced Cooperation Task Force
12.15 - 13.00	Lunch and networking break
13.00 - 16.00	Drafting civil society IG principles for the IGF Development of existing statements Reinforces multi-stakeholder approach Suggests roadmap for improved implementation of enhanced cooperation
16.15 - 17.45	Next steps Making an inclusive civil society network on IG issues sustainable Other existing civil society+ networks – Internet Defence League, Internet Governance Caucus, Global Network Initiative, CSISAC, OpenMedia network, Internet Progress Administration Recap of upcoming events and campaigns for possible joint action

Participants

Alejandro Pisanty
Andrew Puddephatt
Anja Kovacs
Anna Orlova
Anriette Esterhuysen
Antonio Medina Gomez
Arthit Suriyawongkul
Ashnah Kalemera
Avri Doria
bdelachapelle
Brett Solomon
Carlos Alberto Afonso
Claudio Ruiz
Deborah Brown
Dixie Hawtin
Donny B U
Elonnai Hickok
Emma Llanso
Fouad Bajwa
Gene Kimmelman
Iarla Flynn
Imran Ahmed Shah
Jeremy Malcolm
Joana Varon Ferraz
Jochai Ben-Avie
Joonas Mikael Mäkinen
Joy Liddicoat
Katitza Rodriguez
Kevin Bankston
LAURA ABBA
matthew shears
Mawaki Chango
Michael Gurstein
Nnenna Nwakanla
Norbert Bollow
Parminder Jeet Singh
Pranesh Prakash
Premila Kumar
Raquel Gatto
Rashmi Rangnath
Sanja_Kelly
Shahzad Ahmad
Shita Laksmi
STEFANO TRUMPY
Stephanie Borg Psaila
Sylwia Rudnik
Tapani Tarvainen
Theresa Züger
Valeria Betancourt
William Drake
Wolfgang Kleinwächter

Attending Remotely

AHM Bazlur Rahman
Alex Comninos
Baudouin SCHOMBE
chaitanyabd
cveraq
De
encels
Fatima Cambronero
ganda
Hanane
Hindenburgo Francisco Pires
Jorge Gonzalez
Julian Casasbuenas G.
Lorna Tingu Makuma
Narine Khachatryan
natienciso
Pitshou Bulembi Ndongala
richaraix
rohanjay
Siranush Vardanyan
Sonigitu Asibong Ekpe
Susan Coughtrie
thierrys
vinsolo
Virginia Paque

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/best-bits

Bengaluru gives data safety tips to panel

Admin — 2018-01-16T23:19:00Z

A crucial consultation ahead of the framing of the country's data protection laws witnessed animated discussions here on Saturday.

The article was published in Deccan Herald on January 14, 2018

Participants raised a variety of concerns. Held on the IISc campus, it discussed everything from revenge porn and human genomics to artificial intelligence and the right to be forgotten.

Cybersecurity experts, academics, lawyers and others attended the day-long event.

They made their submissions to the Srikrishna Committee, formed on July 31 last year to frame principles for data protection laws.

The session was chaired by Justice B N Srikrishna, retired Supreme Court judge. Also on the panel were Rama Vedashree, CEO, Data Security Council of India, and Gopalakrishnan S.

The basis of the discussion was a 200-page document drafted by the nine members of the Srikrishna Committee. January 31 is the deadline to respond to the committee's white paper.

Classification of data

Several dystopian scenarios, such as profiling and discrimination with the help of behavioural and psychometric data, led to discussions on the need for classification of data types.

Darshana, a lawyer from the People's Union of Civil Liberties (PUCL), spoke about how people were being denied rations for not holding Aadhaar.

The collection of children's biometric data brought up the question of consent.

Srikrishna clarified the white paper contained a chapter on consent: it suggests an age limit below which parental consent will have to be mandatory.

A discussion on the right to be forgotten arose after some participants sought a provision to revoke consent already given.

Questions associated with genome sequencing were raised by Vijay Chandru, professor, IISc.

"We need to pay special attention to this type of information. The collection of DNA in the form of saliva, when, say, you make a visit to a weight loss clinic, has become the commercial norm. The Insurance Regulatory Act can have huge implications as genetic data can be used to discriminate and deny health coverage," Chandru said.

Sunil Abraham, head of the Centre for Internet and Society, said he was delighted with the quality of debate and discussion.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deccan-herald-january-14-2018-pranshu-rathee-bengaluru-gives-data-safety-tips-to-panel

Bengaluru cops' twitter handle in ethical storm

praskrishna — 2017-04-07T02:38:24Z

The city's privacy activists are among the most strident in trying to prevent the Union government from gaining unprecedented access to citizens' personal information through Aadhaar. But in their own backyard, Bengaluru police have been publishing on Twitter the phone numbers of thousands of citizens reporting various crimes such as gambling on the streets, random quarrels and harassment of women.

The article by Umesh Yadav was published in the Times of India on April 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

The police control room has put out more than 46,000 tweets since April 2015 containing the numbers of complainants calling the emergency number 100. The phone numbers of citizens reaching the control room through Bengaluru police's new emergency mobile application, Suraksha, too are being published through this handle.

Thankfully, the Twitter handle, @BCPCR, had a mere 66 followers as on the evening of April 5, nearly 30 per cent of which were various police stations in the city. On Wednesday evening, the police closed the account for public view.

ET has screenshots of tweets from the account. A senior police officer at Bengaluru police's Command Control was unapologetic for the breach of privacy. The tweets are generated automatically and meant to `show' the number of calls received by the control room and the number of people using the new app, he said.

On the matter of compromising the safety of the complainants, the officer said, "It is obvious that the accused will know who registered the complaint and privacy does not matter here."

Expectedly, privacy and law experts are indignant.

"This is horrible and unpardonable," said Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay. "The fact that the police did not consider it necessary to ask for permission before broadcasting someone's identity shows how insensitive the Police Commissioner's office has become to the privacy concern of our society." Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society and who has been at the forefront of the campaign against any potential misuse of Aadhaar, too said the "police officer who ordered to create such an account should be held responsible if any harm comes to a complainant."

Complainants ET spoke with were startled about the abuse of their privacy. Gowda, a complainant, who had informed the police control room about the sale of cigarettes within 100 metres of a school, had specifically requested the police to not disclose his identity.

"(This is why) it is better to keep quiet when you see lawbreakers," he said on hearing that Bengaluru police had published his phone number on Twitter.

"This is injustice and this is the reason why people are scared to inform the police of crimes. If the accused send people to beat me, what should I do?" Dhanusha had called the control room about some teenagers who were teasing girls at a bus stop. The police arrived and took the boys in. She, too, is now worried. "If the accused get my number, they are going to harass me. The police do not have any right to display our phone numbers in public."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-april-6-2017-umesh-yadav-bengaluru-cops-twitter-handle-in-ethical-storm

Benefits, Harms, Rights and Regulation: A Survey of Literature on Big Data

Amber Sinha, Vanya Rakesh, Vidushi Marda and Geethanjali Jujjavarapu — 2017-03-23T02:17:56Z

This survey draws upon a range of literature including news articles, academic articles, and presentations and seeks to disaggregate the potential benefits and harms of big data, organising them into several broad categories that reflect the existing scholarly literature. The survey also recognises the non-technical big data regulatory options which are in place as well as those which have been proposed by various governments, civil society groups and academics.

The survey was edited by Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Leilah Elmokadem

Introduction

In 2011, it was estimated that the quantity of data produced globally surpassed 1.8 zettabyte.By 2013 it had increased to 4 zettabytes. With the nascent development of the so-called ‘Internet of Things’ gathering pace, these trends are likely to continue. This expansion in the volume, velocity, and variety of data available, together with the development of innovative forms of statistical analytics, is generally referred to as “Big Data”; though there is no single agreed upon definition of the term. Although still in its initial stages, big data promises to provide new insights and solutions across a wide range of sectors, many of which would have been unimaginable even a decade ago.

Despite enormous optimism about the scope and variety of big data’s potential applications, many remain concerned about its widespread adoption, with some scholars suggesting it could generate as many harms as benefits. Most notably are the concerns about the inevitable threats to privacy associated with the generation, collection and use of large quantities of data. Concerns have also been raised regarding, for example, the lack of transparency around the design of algorithms used to process the data, over-reliance on big data analytics as opposed to traditional forms of analysis and the creation of new digital divides. The existing literature on big data is vast. However, many of the benefits and harms identified by researchers tend to focus on sector specific applications of Big Data analytics, such as predictive policing, or targeted marketing. Whilst these examples can be useful in demonstrating the diversity of big data’s possible applications, they do not offer a holistic perspective of the broader impacts of Big Data.

Click to read the full survey here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/benefits-harms-rights-and-regulation-survey-of-literature-on-big-data

Benefits and Harms of "Big Data"

Scott Mason — 2015-12-30T02:48:08Z

Today the quantity of data being generated is expanding at an exponential rate. From smartphones and televisions, trains and airplanes, sensor-equipped buildings and even the infrastructures of our cities, data now streams constantly from almost every sector and function of daily life.

Introduction

In 2011 it was estimated that the quantity of data produced globally would surpass 1.8 zettabyte[1]. By 2013 that had grown to 4 zettabytes[2], and with the nascent development of the so-called 'Internet of Things' gathering pace, these trends are likely to continue. This expansion in the volume, velocity, and variety of data available[3] , together with the development of innovative forms of statistical analytics, is generally referred to as "Big Data"; though there is no single agreed upon definition of the term. Although still in its initial stages, Big Data promises to provide new insights and solutions across a wide range of sectors, many of which would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago.

Despite enormous optimism about the scope and variety of Big Data's potential applications however, many remain concerned about its widespread adoption, with some scholars suggesting it could generate as many harms as benefits[4]. Most notably these have included concerns about the inevitable threats to privacy associated with the generation, collection and use of large quantities of data [5]. However, concerns have also been raised regarding, for example, the lack of transparency around the design of algorithms used to process the data, over-reliance on Big Data analytics as opposed to traditional forms of analysis and the creation of new digital divides to just name a few.

The existing literature on Big Data is vast, however many of the benefits and harms identified by researchers tend to relate to sector specific applications of Big Data analytics, such as predictive policing, or targeted marketing. Whilst these examples can be useful in demonstrating the diversity of Big Data's possible applications, it can nevertheless be difficult to gain an overall perspective of the broader impacts of Big Data as a whole. As such this article will seek to disaggregate the potential benefits and harms of Big Data, organising them into several broad categories, which are reflective of the existing scholarly literature.

What are the potential benefits of Big Data?

From politicians to business leaders, recent years have seen Big Data confidently proclaimed as a potential solution to a diverse range of problems from, world hunger and diseases, to government budget deficits and corruption. But if we look beyond the hyperbole and headlines, what do we really know about the advantages of Big Data? Given the current buzz surrounding it, the existing literature on Big Data is perhaps unsurprisingly vast, providing innumerable examples of the potential applications of Big Data from agriculture to policing. However, rather than try (and fail) to list the many possible applications of Big Data analytics across all sectors and industries, for the purposes of this article we have instead attempted to distil the various advantages of Big Data discussed within literature into the following five broad categories; Decision-Making, Efficiency & Productivity, Research & Development, Personalisation and Transparency, each of which will be discussed separately below.

Decision-Making

Whilst data analytics have always been used to improve the quality and efficiency of decision-making processes, the advent of Big Data means that the areas of our lives in which data driven decision- making plays a role is expanding dramatically; as businesses and governments become better able to exploit new data flows. Furthermore, the real-time and predictive nature of decision-making made possible by Big Data, are increasingly allowing these decisions to be automated. As a result, Big Data is providing governments and business with unprecedented opportunities to create new insights and solutions; becoming more responsive to new opportunities and better able to act quickly - and in some cases preemptively - to deal with emerging threats.

This ability of Big Data to speed up and improve decision-making processes can be applied across all sectors from transport to healthcare and is often cited within the literature as one of the key advantages of Big Data. Joh, for example, highlights the increased use of data driven predictive analysis by police forces to help them to forecast the times and geographical locations in which crimes are most likely to occur. This allows the force to redistribute their officers and resources according to anticipated need, and in certain cities has been highly effective in reducing crime rates [6]. Raghupathi meanwhile cites the case of healthcare, where predictive modelling driven by big data is being used to proactively identify patients who could benefit from preventative care or lifestyle changes[7].

One area in particular where the decision-making capabilities of Big Data are having a significant impact is in the field of risk management [8]. For instance, Big Data can allow companies to map their entire data landscape to help detect sensitive information, such as 16 digit numbers - potentially credit card data - which are not being stored according to regulatory requirements and intervene accordingly. Similarly, detailed analysis of data held about suppliers and customers can help companies to identify those in financial trouble, allowing them to act quickly to minimize their exposure to any potential default[9].

Efficiency and Productivity

In an era when many governments and businesses are facing enormous pressures on their budgets, the desire to reduce waste and inefficiency has never been greater. By providing the information and analysis needed for organisations to better manage and coordinate their operations, Big Data can help to alleviate such problems, leading to the better utilization of scarce resources and a more productive workforce [10].

Within the literature such efficiency savings are most commonly discussed in relation to reductions in energy consumption [11]. For example, a report published by Cisco notes how the city of Olso has managed to reduce the energy consumption of street-lighting by 62 percent through the use of smart solutions driven by Big Data[12]. Increasingly, however, statistical models generated by Big Data analytics are also being utilized to identify potential efficiencies in sourcing, scheduling and routing in a wide range of sectors from agriculture to transport. For example, Newell observes how many local governments are generating large databases of scanned license plates through the use of automated license plate recognition systems (ALPR), which government agencies can then use to help improve local traffic management and ease congestion[13].

Commonly these efficiency savings are only made possible by the often counter-intuitive insights generated by the Big Data models. For example, whilst a human analyst planning a truck route would always tend to avoid 'drive-bys' - bypassing one stop to reach a third before doubling back - Big Data insights can sometimes show such routes to be more efficient. In such cases efficiency saving of this kind would in all likelihood have gone unrecognised by a human analyst, not trained to look for such patterns[14].

Research, Development, and Innovation

Perhaps one of the most intriguing benefits of Big Data is its potential use in the research and development of new products and services. As is highlighted throughout the literature, Big Data can help businesses to gain an understanding of how others perceive their products or identify customer demand and adapt their marketing or indeed the design of their products accordingly[15]. Analysis of social media data, for instance, can provide valuable insights into customers' sentiments towards existing products as well as discover demands for new products and services, allowing businesses to respond more quickly to changes in customer behaviour[16].

In addition to market research, Big Data can also be used during the design and development stage of new products; for example by helping to test thousands of different variations of computer-aided designs in an expedient and cost-effective manner. In doing so, business and designers are able to better assess how minor changes to a products design may affect its cost and performance, thereby improving the cost-effectiveness of the production process and increasing profitability.

Personalisation

For many consumers, perhaps the most familiar application of Big Data is its ability to help tailor products and services to meet their individual preferences. This phenomena is most immediately noticeable on many online services such as Netflix; where data about users activities and preferences is collated and analysed to provide a personalised service, for example by suggesting films or television shows the user may enjoy based upon their previous viewing history[17]. By enabling companies to generate in-depth profiles of their customers, Big Data allows businesses to move past the 'one size fits all' approach to product and services design and instead quickly and cost-effectively adapt their services to better meet customer demand.

In addition to service personalisation, similar profiling techniques are increasingly being utilized in sectors such as healthcare. Here data about a patient's medical history, lifestyle, and even their gene expression patterns are collated, generating a detailed medical profile which can then be used to tailor treatments to meet their specific needs[18]. Targeted care of this sort can not only help to reduce costs for example by helping to avoid over-prescriptions, but may also help to improve the effectiveness of treatments and so ultimately their outcome.

Transparency

If 'knowledge is power', then, - so say Big Data enthusiasts - advances in data analytics and the quantity of data available can give consumers and citizens the knowledge to hold governments and businesses to account, as well as make more informed choices about the products and services they use. Nevertheless, data (even lots of it) does not necessarily equal knowledge. In order for citizens and consumers to be able to fully utilize the vast quantities of data available to them, they must first have some way to make sense of it. For some, Big Data analytics provides just such a solution, allowing users to easily search, compare and analyze available data, thereby helping to challenge existing information asymmetries and make business and government more transparent[19].

In the private sector, Big Data enthusiasts have claimed that Big Data holds the potential to ensure complete transparency of supply chains, enabling concerned consumers to trace the source of their products, for example to ensure that they have been sourced ethically [20]. Furthermore, Big Data is now making accessible information which was previously unavailable to average consumers and challenging companies whose business models rely on the maintenance of information asymmetries.The real-estate industry, for example, relies heavily upon its ability to acquire and control proprietary information, such as transaction data as a competitive asset. In recent years, however, many online services have allowed consumers to effectively bypass agents, by providing alternative sources of real-estate data and enabling prospective buyers and sellers to communicate directly with each other[21]. Therefore, providing consumers with access to large quantities of actionable data . Big Data can help to eliminate established information asymmetries, allowing them to make better and more informed decisions about the products they buy and the services they enlist.

This potential to harness the power of Big Data to improve transparency and accountability can also be seen in the public sector, with many scholars suggesting that greater access to government data could help to stem corruption and make politics more accountable. This view was recently endorsed by the UN who highlighted the potential uses of Big Data to improve policymaking and accountability in a report published by the Independent Expert Advisory Group on the "Data Revolution for Sustainable Development". In the report experts emphasize the potential of what they term the 'data revolution', to help achieve sustainable development goals by for example helping civil society groups and individuals to 'develop data literacy and help communities and individuals to generate and use data, to ensure accountability and make better decisions for themselves' [22].

What are the potential harms of Big Data?

Whilst it is often easy to be seduced by the utopian visions of Big Data evangelists, in order to ensure that Big Data can deliver the types of far-reaching benefits its proponents promise, it is vital that we are also sensitive to its potential harms. Within the existing literature, discussions about the potential harms of Big Data are perhaps understandably dominated by concerns about privacy. Yet as Big Data has begun to play an increasingly central role in our daily lives, a broad range of new threats have begun to emerge including issues related to security and scientific epistemology, as well as problems of marginalisation, discrimination and transparency; each of which will be discussed separately below.

Privacy

By far the biggest concern raised by researchers in relation to Big Data is its risk to privacy. Given that by its very nature Big Data requires extensive and unprecedented access to large quantities of data; it is hardly surprising that many of the benefits outlined above in one way or another exist in tension with considerations of privacy. Although many scholars have called for a broader debate on the effects of Big Data on ethical best practice ^{^[23]}, a comprehensive exploration into the complex debates surrounding the ethical implications of Big Data go far beyond the scope of this article. Instead we will simply attempt to highlight some of the major areas of concern expressed in the literature, including its effects on established principles of privacy and the implication of Big Data on the suitability of existing regulatory frameworks governing privacy and data protection.

1. Re-identification

Traditionally many Big Data enthusiasts have used de-identification - the process of anonymising data by removing personally identifiable information (PII) - as a way of justifying mass collection and use of personal data. By claiming that such measures are sufficient to ensure the privacy of users, data brokers, companies and governments have sought to deflect concerns about the privacy implications of Big Data, and suggest that it can be compliant with existing regulatory and legal frameworks on data protection.

However, many scholars remain concerned about the limits of anonymisation. As Tene and Polonetsky observe 'Once data-such as a clickstream or a cookie number-are linked to an identified individual, they become difficult to disentangle'[24]. They cite the example of University of Texas researchers Narayanan and Shmatikov, who were able to successfully re-identify anonymised Netflix user data by cross referencing it with data stored in a publicly accessible online database. As Narayanan and Shmatikov themselves explained, 'once any piece of data has been linked to a person's real identity, any association between this data and a virtual identity breaks anonymity of the latter' [25]. The quantity and variety of datasets which Big Data analytics has made associable with individuals is therefore expanding the scope of the types of data that can be considered PII, as well as undermining claims that de-identification alone is sufficient to ensure privacy for users.

2. Privacy Frameworks Obsolete?

In recent decades privacy and data protection frameworks based upon a number of so-called 'privacy principles' have formed the basis of most attempts to encourage greater consideration of privacy issues online[26]. For many however, the emergence of Big Data has raised question about the extent to which these 'principles of privacy' are workable in an era of ubiquitous data collection.

Collection Limitation and Data Minimization : Big Data by its very nature requires the collection and processing of very large and very diverse data sets. Unlike other forms scientific research and analysis which utilize various sampling techniques to identify and target the types of data most useful to the research questions, Big Data instead seeks to gather as much data as possible, in order to achieve full resolution of the phenomenon being studied, a task made much easier in recent years as a result of the proliferation of internet enabled devices and the growth of the Internet of Things. This goal of attaining comprehensive coverage exists in tension however with the key privacy principles of collection limitation and data minimization which seek to limit both the quantity and variety of data collected about an individual to the absolute minimum[27].

Purpose Limitation: Since the utility of a given dataset is often not easily identifiable at the time of collection, datasets are increasingly being processed several times for a variety of different purposes. Such practices have significant implications for the principle of purpose limitation, which aims to ensure that organizations are open about their reasons for collecting data, and that they use and process the data for no other purpose than those initially specified [28].

Notice and Consent: The principles of notice and consent have formed the cornerstones of attempts to protect privacy for decades. Nevertheless in an era of ubiquitous data collection, the notion that an individual must be required to provide their explicit consent to allow for the collection and processing of their data seems increasingly antiquated, a relic of an age when it was possible to keep track of your personal data relationships and transactions. Today as data streams become more complex, some have begun to question suitability of consent as a mechanism to protect privacy. In particular commentators have noted how given the complexity of data flows in the digital ecosystem most individuals are not well placed to make truly informed decisions about the management of their data[29]. In one study, researchers demonstrated how by creating the perceptions of control, users were more likely to share their personal information, regardless of whether or not the users had actually gained control [30]. As such, for many, the garnering of consent is increasingly becoming a symbolic box-ticking exercise which achieves little more than to irritate and inconvenience customers whilst providing a burden for companies and a hindrance to growth and innovation [31].

Access and Correction: The principle of 'access and correction' refers to the rights of individuals to obtain personal information being held about them as well as the right to erase, rectify, complete or otherwise amend that data. Aside from the well documented problems with privacy self-management, for many the real-time nature of data generation and analysis in an era of Big Data poses a number of structural challenges to this principle of privacy. As x comments, 'a good amount of data is not pre-processed in a similar fashion as traditional data warehouses. This creates a number of potential compliance problems such as difficulty erasing, retrieving or correcting data. A typical big data system is not built for interactivity, but for batch processing. This also makes the application of changes on a (presumably) static data set difficult'[32].

Opt In-Out: The notion that the provision of data should be a matter of personal choice on the part of the individual and that the individual can, if they chose decide to 'opt-out' of data collection, for example by ceasing use of a particular service, is an important component of privacy and data protection frameworks. The proliferation of internet-enabled devices, their integration into the built environment and the real-time nature of data collection and analysis however are beginning to undermine this concept. For many critics of Big Data the ubiquity of data collection points as well as the compulsory provision of data as a prerequisite for the access and use of many key online services is making opting-out of data collection not only impractical but in some cases impossible. [33]

3. "Chilling Effects"

For many scholars the normalization of large scale data collection is steadily producing a widespread perception of ubiquitous surveillance amongst users. Drawing upon Foucault's analysis of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon and the disciplinary effects of surveillance, they argue that this perception of permanent visibility can cause users to sub-consciously 'discipline' and self- regulate of their own behavior, fearful of being targeted or identified as 'abnormal' [34]. As a result, the pervasive nature of Big Data risks generating a 'chilling effect' on user behavior and free speech.

Although the notion of "chilling effects" is quite prevalent throughout the academic literature on surveillance and security, the difficulty of quantifying the perception and effects of surveillance on online behavior and practices means that there have only been a limited number of empirical studies of this phenomena, and none directly related to the chilling effects of Big Data. One study, conducted by researchers at MIT however, sought to assess the impact of Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance programs on Google search trends. Nearly 6,000 participants were asked to individually rate certain keywords for their perceived degree of privacy sensitivity along multiple dimensions. Using Google's own publicly available search data, the researchers then analyzed search patterns for these terms before and after the Snowden revelations. In doing so they were able to demonstrate a reduction of around 2.2% in searchers for those terms deemed to be most sensitive in nature. According to the researchers themselves, the results 'suggest that there is a chilling effect on search behaviour from government surveillance on the Internet'[35]. Although this study focussed on the effects on government surveillance, for many privacy advocates the growing pervasiveness of Big Data risks generating similar results. [36]

4. Dignitary Harms of Predictive Decision-Making

In addition to its potentially chilling effects on free speech, the automated nature of Big Data analytics also possess the potential to inflict so-called 'dignitary harms' on individuals, by revealing insights about themselves that they would have preferred to keep private [37].

In an infamous example, following a shopping trip to the retail chain Target, a young girl began to receive mail at her father's house advertising products for babies including, diapers, clothing, and cribs. In response, her father complained to the management of the company, incensed by what he perceived to be the company's attempts to "encourage" pregnancy in teens. A few days later however, the father was forced to contact the store again to apologies, after his daughter had confessed to him that she was indeed pregnant. It was later revealed that Target regularly analyzed the sale of key products such as supplements or unscented lotions in order to generate "pregnancy prediction" scores, which could be used to assess the likelihood that a customer was pregnant and to therefore target them with relevant offers[38]. Such cases, though anecdotal illustrate how Big Data if not adopted sensitively can lead to potential embarrassing information about users being made public.

Security

In relation to cybersecurity Big Data can be viewed to a certain extent as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the unique capabilities of Big Data analytics can provide organizations with new and innovative methods of enhancing their cybersecurity systems. On the other however, the sheer quantity and diversity of data emanating from a variety of sources creates its own security risks.

5. "Honey-Pot"

The larger the quantities of confidential information stored by companies on their databases the more attractive those databases may appear to potential hackers.

6. Data Redundancy and Dispersion

Inherent to Big Data systems is the duplication of data to many locations in order to optimize query processing. Data is dispersed across a wide range of data repositories in different servers, in different parts of the world. As a result it may be difficult for organizations to accurately locate and secure all items of personal information.

Epistemological and Methodological Implications

In 2008 Chris Anderson infamously proclaimed the 'end of theory'. Writing for Wired Magazine, Anderson predicted that the coming age of Big Data would create a 'deluge of data' so large that the scientific methods of hypothesis, sampling and testing would be rendered 'obsolete' [39]. 'There is now a better way' Anderson insisted, 'Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot'[40].

In spite of these bold claims however, many theorists remain skeptical of Big Data's methodological benefits and have expressed concern about its potential implications for conventional scientific epistemologies. For them the increased prominence of Big Data analytics in science does not signal a paradigmatic transition to a more enlightened data-driven age, but a hollowing out of the scientific method and an abandonment of casual knowledge in favor of shallow correlative analysis[41].

7. Obfuscation

Although Big Data analytics can be utilized to study almost any phenomena where enough data exists, many theorists have warned that simply because Big Data analytics can be used does not necessarily mean that they should be used[42]. Bigger is not always better and indeed the sheer quantity of data made available to users may in fact act to obscure certain insights. Whereas traditional scientific methods use sampling techniques to identify the most important and relevant data, Big Data by contrast encourages the collection and use of as much data as possible, in an attempt to attain full resolution of the phenomena being studied. However, not all data is equally useful and simply inputting as much data as possible into an algorithm is unlikely to produce accurate results and may instead obscure key insights.

Indeed, whilst the promise of automation is central to a large part of Big Data's appeal, researchers observe that most Big Data analysis still requires an element of human judgement to filter out the 'good' data from the 'bad', and to decide what aspects of the data are relevant to the research objectives. As Boyd and Crawford observe, 'in the case of social media data, there is a 'data cleaning' process: making decisions about what attributes and variables will be counted, and which will be ignored. This process is inherently subjective"^{^[43]}.

Google's Flu Trend project provides an illustrative example of how Big Data's tendency to try to maximise data inputs can produce misleading results. Designed to accurately track flu outbreaks based upon data collected from Google searches, the project was initially proclaimed to be a great success. Gradually however it became apparent that the results being produced were not reflective of the reality on the ground. Later it was discovered that the algorithms used by the project to interpret search terms were insufficiently accurate to filter out anomalies in searches, such as those related to the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic. As such, despite the great promise of Big Data, scholars insist it remains critical to be mindful of its limitations, remain selective about the types of data included in the analysis and exercise caution and intuition whenever interpreting its results ^{^[44]}.

8. "Apophenia"

In complete contrast to the problem of obfuscation, Boyd and Crawford observe how Big Data may also lead to the practice of 'apophenia', a phenomena whereby analysts interpret patterns where none exist, 'simply because enormous quantities of data can offer connections that radiate in all directions" ^{^[45]}. David Leinweber for example demonstrated that data mining techniques could show strong but ultimately spurious correlations between changes in the S&P 500 stock index and butter production in Bangladesh [46]. Such spurious correlation between disparate and unconnected phenomena are a common feature of Big Data analytics and risks leading to unfounded conclusions being draw from the data.

Although Leinweber's primary focus of analysis was the use of Data-Mining technologies, his observations are equally applicable to Big Data. Indeed the tendency amongst Big Data analysts to marginalise the types of domain specific expertise capable of differentiating between relevant and irrelevant correlations in favour of algorithmic automation can in many ways be seen to exacerbate many of the problems Leinweber identified.

9. From Causation to Correlation

Closely related to the problem of Aphonenia is the concern that Big Data's emphasis on correlative analysis risks leading to an abandonment of the pursuit of causal knowledge in favour of shallow descriptive accounts of scientific phenomena[47].

For many, Big Data enthusiasts 'correlation is enough', producing inherently meaningful results interpretable by anyone without the need for pre-existing theory or hypothesis. Whilst proponents of Big Data claim that such an approach allows them to produce objective knowledge, by cleansing the data of any kind of philosophical or ideological commitment, for others by neglecting the knowledge of domain experts, Big Data risks generating a shallow type of analysis, since it fails to adequately embed observations within a pre-existing body of knowledge.

This commitment to an empiricist epistemology and methodological monism is particularly problematic in the context of studies of human behaviour, where actions cannot be calculated and anticipated using quantifiable data alone. In such instances, a certain degree of qualitative analysis of social, historical and cultural variables may be required in order to make the data meaningful by embedding it within a broader body of knowledge. The abstract and intangible nature of these variables requires a great deal of expert knowledge and interpretive skill to comprehend. It is therefore vital that the knowledge of domain specific experts is properly utilized to help 'evaluate the inputs, guide the process, and evaluate the end products within the context of value and validity'[48].

As such, although Big Data can provide unrivalled accounts of "what" people do, it fundamentally fails to deliver robust explanations of "why" people do it. This problem is especially critical in the case of public policy-making since without any indication of the motivations of individuals, policy-makers can have no basis upon which to intervene to incentivise more positive outcomes.

Digital Divides and Marginalisation

Today data is a highly valuable commodity. The market for data in and of itself has been steadily growing in recent years with the business models of many online services now formulated around the strategy of harvesting data from users^{^[49]}. As with the commodification of anything however, inequalities can easily emerge between the haves and have not's. Whilst the quantity of data currently generated on a daily basis is many times greater than at any other point in human history, the vast majority of this data is owned and tightly controlled by a very small number of technology companies and data brokers. Although in some instances limited access to data may be granted to university researchers or to those willing and able to pay a fee, in many cases data remains jealously guarded by data brokers, who view it as an important competitive asset. As a result these data brokers and companies risk becoming the gatekeepers of the Big Data revolution, adjudicating not only over who can benefit from Big Data, but also in what context and under what terms. For many such inconsistencies and inequalities in access to data raises serious doubts about just how widely distributed the benefits of Big Data will be. Others go even further claiming that far from helping to alleviate inequalities, the advent of Big Data risks exacerbating already significant digital divides that exist as well as creating new ones ^{^[50]}.

10. Anti-Competitive Practices

As a result of the reluctance of large companies to share their data, there increasingly exists a divide in access between small start-ups companies and their larger and more established competitors. Thus, new entrants to the marketplace may be at a competitive disadvantage in relation to large and well established enterprises, being as they are unable to harness the analytical power of the vast quantities of data available to large companies by virtue of their privileged market position. Since the performance of many online services are today often intimately connected with the collation and use of users data, some researchers have suggested that this inequity in access to data could lead to a reduction in competition in the online marketplace, and ultimately therefore to less innovation and choice for consumers[51].

As a result researchers including Nathan Newman of New York University have called for a reassessment and reorientation of anti-trust investigations and regulatory approaches more generally to 'to focus on how control of personal data by corporations can entrench monopoly power and harm consumer welfare in an economy shaped increasingly by the power of "big data"'[52]. Similarly a report produced by the European Data Protection Supervisor concluded that, 'The scope for abuse of market dominance and harm to the consumer through refusal of access to personal information and opaque or misleading privacy policies may justify a new concept of consumer harm for competition enforcement in digital economy' [53].

11. Research

From a research perspective barriers to access to data caused by proprietary control of datasets are problematic, since certain types of research could become restricted to those privileged enough to be granted access to data. Meanwhile those denied access are left not only incapable of conducting similar research projects, but also unable to test, verify or reproduce the findings of those who do. The existence of such gatekeepers may also lead to reluctance on the part of researchers to undertake research critical of the companies, upon whom they rely for access, leading to a chilling effect on the types of research conducted[54].

12. Inequality

Whilst bold claims are regularly made about the potential of Big Data to deliver economic development and generate new innovations, some critics of remain concerned about how equally the benefits of Big Data will be distributed and the effects this could have on already established digital divides [55].

Firstly, whilst the power of Big Data is already being utilized effectively by most economically developed nations, the same cannot necessarily be said for many developing countries. A combination of lower levels of connectivity, poor information infrastructure, underinvestment in information technologies and a lack of skills and trained personnel make it far more difficult for the developing world to fully reap the rewards of Big Data. As a consequence the Big Data revolution risks deepening global economic inequality as developing countries find themselves unable to compete with data rich nations whose governments can more easily exploit the vast quantities of information generated by their technically literate and connected citizens.

Likewise, to the extent that the Big Data analytics is playing a greater role in public policy-making, the capacity of individuals to generate large quantities of data, could potentially impact upon the extent to which they can provide inputs into the policy-making process. In a country such as India for example, where there exist high levels of inequality in access to information and communication technologies and the internet, there remain large discrepancies in the quantities of data produced by individuals. As a result there is a risk that those who lack access to the means of producing data will be disenfranchised, as policy-making processes become configured to accommodate the needs and interests of a privilege minority [56].

Discrimination

13. Injudicious or Discriminatory Outcomes

Big Data presents the opportunity for governments, businesses and individuals to make better, more informed decisions at a much faster pace. Whilst this can evidently provide innumerable opportunities to increase efficiency and mitigate risk, by removing human intervention and oversight from the decision-making process Big Data analysts run the risk of becoming blind to unfair or injudicious results generated by skewed or discriminatory programming of the algorithms.

There currently exists a large number of automated decision-making algorithms in operation across a broad range of sectors including most notably perhaps those used to asses an individual's suitability for insurance or credit. In either of these cases faults in the programming or discriminatory assessment criteria can have potentially damaging implications for the individual, who may as a result be unable to attain credit or insurance. This concern with the potentially discriminatory aspects of Big Data is prevalent throughout the literature and real life examples have been identified by researchers in a large number of major sectors in which Big Data is currently being used[57].

Yu for instance, cites the case of the insurance company Progressive, which required its customers to install 'Snapsnot' - a small monitoring device - into their cars in order to receive their best rates. The device tracked and reported the customers driving habits, and offered discounts to those drivers who drove infrequently, broke smoothly, and avoided driving at night - behaviors that correlate with a lower risk of future accidents. Although this form of price differentiation provided incentives for customers to drive more carefully, it also had the unintended consequence of unfairly penalizing late-night shift workers. As Yu observes, 'for late night shift-workers, who are disproportionately poorer and from minority groups, this differential pricing provides no benefit at all. It categorizes them as similar to late-night party-goers, forcing them to carry more of the cost of the intoxicated and other irresponsible driving that happens disproportionately at night'[58].

In another example, it is noted how Big Data is increasingly being used to evaluate applicants for entry-level service jobs. One method of evaluating applicants is by the length of their commute - the rationale being that employees with shorter commutes are statistically more likely to remain in the job longer. However, since most service jobs are typically located in town centers and since poorer neighborhoods tend to be those on the outskirts of town, such criteria can have the effect of unfairly disadvantaging those living in economically deprived areas. Consequently such metrics of evaluation can therefore also unintentionally act to reinforce existing social inequalities by making it more difficult for economically disadvantaged communities to work their way out of poverty[59].

14. Lack of Algorithmic Transparency.

If data is indeed the 'oil of the 21^st century'[60] then algorithms are very much the engines which are driving innovation and economic development. For many companies the quality of their algorithms is often a crucial factor in providing them with a market advantage over their competitor. Given their importance, the secrets behind the programming of algorithms are often closely guarded by companies, and are typically classified as trade secrets and as such are protected by intellectual property rights. Whilst companies may claim that such secrecy is necessary to encourage market competition and innovation, many scholars are becoming increasingly concerned about the lack of transparency surrounding the design of these most crucial tools.

In particular there is a growing sentiment common amongst many researchers that there currently exists a chronic lack of accountability and transparency in terms of how Big Data algorithms are programmed and what criteria are used to determine outcomes ^{^[61]}. As Frank Pasquale observed,

' hidden algorithms can make (or ruin) reputations, decide the destiny of entrepreneurs, or even devastate an entire economy. Shrouded in secrecy and complexity, decisions at major Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms were long assumed to be neutral and technical. But leaks, whistleblowers, and legal disputes have shed new light on automated judgment. Self-serving and reckless behavior is surprisingly common, and easy to hide in code protected by legal and real secrecy'[62].

As such, without increased transparency in algorithmic design, instances of Big Data discrimination may go unnoticed as analyst are unable to access the information necessary to identify them.

Conclusion

Today Big Data presents us with as many challenges as it does benefits. Whilst Big Data analytics can offer incredible opportunities to reduce inefficiency, improve decision-making, and increase transparency, concerns remain about the effects of these new technologies on issues such as privacy, equality and discrimination. Although the tensions between the competing demands of Big Data advocates and their critics may appear irreconcilable; only by highlighting these points of contestation can we hope to begin to ask the types of important and difficult questions necessary to do so, including; how can we reconcile Big Data's need for massive inputs of personal information with core principles of privacy such as data minimization and collection limitation? What processes and procedures need to be put in place during the design and implementation of Big Data models and algorithms to provide sufficient transparency and accountability so as to avoid instances of discrimination? What measures can be used to help close digital divides and ensure that the benefits of Big Data are shared equitably? Questions such as these are today only just beginning to be addressed; each however, will require careful consideration and reasoned debate, if Big Data is to deliver on its promises and truly fulfil its 'revolutionary' potential.

[1] Gantz, J., &Reinsel, D. Extracting Value from Chaos, IDC, (2011), available at: http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/idc-extracting-value-from-chaos-ar.pdf

[2] Meeker, M. & Yu, L. Internet Trends, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, (2013), http://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/kpcb-internet-trends-2013 .

[3] Douglas, L. "3D Data Management: Controlling Data Volume, Velocity and Variety" . Gartner, (2001)

[4] Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society,Vol 15, Issue 5, (2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878, Tene, O., &Polonetsky, J. Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics, 11 Nw. J. Tech. &Intell. Prop. 239 (2013) http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol11/iss5/1

[5] Ibid.,

[6] Joh. E, 'Policing by Numbers: Big Data and the Fourth Amendment', Washington Law Review, Vol. 85: 35, (2014) https://digital.law.washington.edu/dspace-law/bitstream/handle/1773.1/1319/89WLR0035.pdf?sequence=1

[7] Raghupathi, W., &Raghupathi, V. Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential. Health Information Science and Systems, (2014)

[8] Anderson, R., & Roberts, D. 'Big Data: Strategic Risks and Opportunities, Crowe Horwarth Global Risk Consulting Limited, (2012) https://www.crowehorwath.net/uploadedfiles/crowe-horwath-global/tabbed_content/big%20data%20strategic%20risks%20and%20opportunities%20white%20paper_risk13905.pdf

[9] Ibid.

[10] Kshetri. N, 'The Emerging role of Big Data in Key development issues: Opportunities, challenges, and concerns'. Big Data & Society (2014)http://bds.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2053951714564227.abstract,

[11] Tene, O., &Polonetsky, J. Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics, 11 Nw. J. Tech. &Intell. Prop. 239 (2013) http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol11/iss5/1

[12] Cisco, 'IoE-Driven Smart Street Lighting Project Allows Oslo to Reduce Costs, Save Energy, Provide Better Service', Cisco, (2014) Available at: http://www.cisco.com/c/dam/m/en_us/ioe/public_sector/pdfs/jurisdictions/Oslo_Jurisdiction_Profile_051214REV.pdf

[13] Newell, B, C. Local Law Enforcement Jumps on the Big Data Bandwagon: Automated License Plate Recognition Systems, Information Privacy, and Access to Government Information. University of Washington - the Information School, (2013) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2341182

[14] Morris, D. Big data could improve supply chain efficiency-if companies would let it, Fortune, August 5 2015, http://fortune.com/2015/08/05/big-data-supply-chain/

[15] Tucker, Darren S., & Wellford, Hill B., Big Mistakes Regarding Big Data, Antitrust Source, American Bar Association, (2014). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2549044

[16] Davenport, T., Barth., Bean, R. How is Big Data Different, MITSloan Management Review, Fall (2012), Available at, http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-big-data-is-different/

[17] Tucker, Darren S., & Wellford, Hill B., Big Mistakes Regarding Big Data, Antitrust Source, American Bar Association, (2014). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2549044

[18] Raghupathi, W., &Raghupathi, V. Big data analytics in healthcare: promise and potential. Health Information Science and Systems, (2014)

[19] Brown, B., Chui, M., Manyika, J. 'Are you Ready for the Era of Big Data?', McKinsey Quarterly, (2011), Available at, http://www.t-systems.com/solutions/download-mckinsey-quarterly-/1148544_1/blobBinary/Study-McKinsey-Big-data.pdf ; Benady, D., 'Radical transparency will be unlocked by technology and big data', Guardian (2014) Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/radical-transparency-unlocked-technology-big-data

[20] Ibid.

[21] Ibid.

[22] United Nations, A World That Counts: Mobilising the Data Revolution for Sustainable Development, Report prepared at the request of the United Nations Secretary-General,by the Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolutionfor Sustainable Development. (2014), pg. 18, see also, Hilbert, M. Big Data for Development: From Information- to Knowledge Societies (2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2205145

[23] Greenleaf, G. Abandon All Hope? Foreword for Issue 37(2) of the UNSW Law Journal on 'Communications Surveillance, Big Data, and the Law' ,(2014) http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2490425##, Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 15, Issue 5, (2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

[24] Tene, O., &Polonetsky, J. Big Data for All: Privacy and User Control in the Age of Analytics, 11 Nw. J. Tech. &Intell. Prop. 239 (2013) http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/njtip/vol11/iss5/1

[25] Narayanan and Shmatikov quoted in Ibid.,

[26] OECD, Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data, The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, (1999); The European Parliament and the Council of the European Union, EU Data Protection Directive, "Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data," (1995)

[27] Barocas, S., &Selbst, A, D., Big Data's Disparate Impact,California Law Review, Vol. 104, (2015). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2477899

[28] Article 29 Working Group., Opinion 03/2013 on purpose limitation, Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, (2013) available at: http://ec.europa.eu/justice/data-protection/article-29/documentation/opinion-recommendation/files/2013/wp203_en.pdf

[29] Solove, D, J. Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1880 (2013), Available at: http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2093&context=faculty_publications

[30] Brandimarte, L., Acquisti, A., & Loewenstein, G., Misplaced Confidences:

Privacy and the Control Paradox, Ninth Annual Workshop on the Economics of Information Security (WEIS) June 7-8 2010, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, (2010), available at: https://fpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Misplaced-Confidences-acquisti-FPF.pdf

[31] Solove, D, J., Privacy Self-Management and the Consent Dilemma, 126 Harv. L. Rev. 1880 (2013), Available at: http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2093&context=faculty_publications

[32] Yu, W, E., Data., Privacy and Big Data-Compliance Issues and Considerations, ISACA Journal, Vol. 3 2014 (2014), available at: http://www.isaca.org/Journal/archives/2014/Volume-3/Pages/Data-Privacy-and-Big-Data-Compliance-Issues-and-Considerations.aspx

[33] Ramirez, E., Brill, J., Ohlhausen, M., Wright, J., & McSweeny, T., Data Brokers: A Call for Transparency and Accountability, Federal Trade Commission (2014) https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/data-brokers-call-transparency-accountability-report-federal-trade-commission-may-2014/140527databrokerreport.pdf

[34] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, London: Allen Lane, Penguin, (1977)

[35] Marthews, A., & Tucker, C., Government Surveillance and Internet Search Behavior (2015), available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2412564

[36] Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society, Vol. 15, Issue 5, (2012)

[37] Hirsch, D., That's Unfair! Or is it? Big Data, Discrimination and the FTC's Unfairness Authority, Kentucky Law Journal, Vol. 103, available at: http://www.kentuckylawjournal.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/103KyLJ345.pdf

[38] Hill, K., How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Didhttp://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/

[39] Anderson, C (2008) "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete", WIRED, June 23 2008, www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory/

[40] Ibid.,

[41] Kitchen, R (2014) Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts, Big Data & Society, April-June 2014: 1-12

[42] Boyd D and Crawford K (2012) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication and Society 15(5): 662-679

[43] Ibid

[44] Lazer, D., Kennedy, R., King, G., &Vespignani, A. " The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis ." Science 343 (2014): 1203-1205. Copy at http://j.mp/1ii4ETo

[45] Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society,Vol 15, Issue 5, (2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

[46] Leinweber, D. (2007) 'Stupid data miner tricks: overfitting the S&P 500', The Journal of Investing, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 15-22. http://m.shookrun.com/documents/stupidmining.pdf

[47] Boyd D and Crawford K (2012) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication and Society 15(5): 662-679

[48] McCue, C., Data Mining and Predictive Analysis: Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis, Butterworth-Heinemann, (2014)

[49] De Zwart, M. J., Humphreys, S., & Van Dissel, B. Surveillance, big data and democracy: lessons for Australia from the US and UK. Http://www.unswlawjournal.unsw.edu.au/issue/volume-37-No-2. (2014) Retrieved from https://digital.library.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/90048

[50] Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society,Vol 15, Issue 5, (2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878; Newman, N., Search, Antitrust and the Economics of the Control of User Data, 31 YALE J. ON REG. 401 (2014)

[51] Newman, N., The Cost of Lost Privacy: Search, Antitrust and the Economics of the Control of User Data (2013). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2265026, Newman, N. ,Search, Antitrust and the Economics of the Control of User Data, 31 YALE J. ON REG. 401 (2014)

[52] Ibid.,

[53] European Data Protection Supervisor, Privacy and competitiveness in the age of big data:

The interplay between data protection, competition law and consumer protection in the Digital Economy, (2014), available at: https://secure.edps.europa.eu/EDPSWEB/webdav/shared/Documents/Consultation/Opinions/2014/14-03-26_competitition_law_big_data_EN.pdf

[54] Boyd, D., and Crawford, K. 'Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon', Information, Communication & Society,Vol 15, Issue 5, (2012) http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/1369118X.2012.678878

[55] Schradie, J., Big Data Not Big Enough? How the Digital Divide Leaves People Out, MediaShift, 31 July 2013, (2013), available at: http://mediashift.org/2013/07/big-data-not-big-enough-how-digital-divide-leaves-people-out/

[56] Crawford, K., The Hidden Biases in Big Data, Harvard Business Review, 1 April 2013 (2013), available at: https://hbr.org/2013/04/the-hidden-biases-in-big-data

[57] Robinson, D., Yu, H., Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future, (2014) http://bigdata.fairness.io/introduction/

[58] Ibid.

[59] Ibid

[60] Rotellla, P., Is Data The New Oil? Forbes, 2 April 2012, (2012), available at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/perryrotella/2012/04/02/is-data-the-new-oil/

[61] Barocas, S., &Selbst, A, D., Big Data's Disparate Impact,California Law Review, Vol. 104, (2015). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2477899; Kshetri. N, 'The Emerging role of Big Data in Key development issues: Opportunities, challenges, and concerns'. Big Data & Society(2014) http://bds.sagepub.com/content/1/2/2053951714564227.abstract

[62] Pasquale, F., The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information, Harvard University Press , (2015)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/benefits-and-harms-of-big-data

Belling the trolls

praskrishna — 2016-07-24T16:44:18Z

Online abuse - specially against women - is like one of those rapidly-mutating viruses that resists all antibodies.

The article by Bishakha Datta was published in India Today on July 13, 2016. Rohini Lakshane was quoted.

We have always known that the proof of the pudding lies in the eating. And the pleasure with which it is savoured. This month, we saw its online avatar. Barely had Maneka Gandhi launched the Twitter hashtag #IAmTrolledHelp than the trolls were all over it. Trolling with all their might. Abusing both Gandhi and textile minister Smriti Irani, thereby proving her point: that something needs to be done about the unending stream of online abuse that women face every day.

Online abuse - specially against women - is like one of those rapidly-mutating viruses that resists all antibodies. It's everywhere, in many different forms. I'm not talking about the everyday sexism that's our daily bread. That we deal with. I'm not talking about androcentrism, or the assumption that men, and male experience, are at the centre of the universe. That we live with, constantly rolling our eyes in our heads.

I'm talking rape threats. Gang rape threats. Graphic gang rape threats with vivid descriptions of postures. Death threats. Those, in my view, are not free speech. They are a call to arms, incitement to violence. Especially when it's an invisible cyber-army behind the threats, backing each other up, preying on a woman. Wilding. Trying to break her. Trying to humiliate her. Trying to get her to shut up, out of the misplaced notion that only men have the right to air their thoughts and opinions online. In a public space.

In one of her essays, Egyptian writer Fatima Mernissi introduces the concept of 'trespassing in the nude' to explain how men in Morocco think of public spaces-as a men-only zone. Social norms dictate that Moroccan women not seek to be part of public space; women who break that rule are seen to be trespassing. But women who dare to step into public spaces without their veils-that's even worse. That's trespassing in the nude. And trespassing, of course, demands punishment.

On the internet, women who speak out are seen as trespassers. And women who speak about things men consider their preserve are seen to doubly trespass. Or trespass in the nude. As British writer Laurie Penny famously said, "A woman's opinion is the short skirt of the internet." It is an excuse to harass.

The women on Morocco's streets were punished by stoning, as are the women who loiter on the streets of the internet. Online abuse is as good as stoning someone who has an opinion with words. When journalist Swati Chaturvedi got massively harassed last year, she wrote about her experience: "Journalists, specially women, are hunted for sport, abused, slandered and hounded by trolls who hunt in hyena-like packs. The problem is that you have an opinion and are behaving like a journalist, not a cheerleader."

Little wonder than that Chaturvedi, like many other women online, have welcomed Gandhi's initiative to curb online abuse. As do I. I'm writing this in the middle of conducting a digital security workshop. At lunch, one of the participants described how she can't bear to be on her company's social media feed for more than an hour each morning. It's just an endless stream of filth. And something needs to be done about this filth if we want a #SwachhBharat.

Many women have tried ignoring online abuse. It continues. Others have tried fighting back. It continues. Some have tried humour, including the Peng Collective's brilliant Zero Trollerance campaign. The trolls march on, undeterred, like Tolkien's orcs. Of course, it's important to distinguish between trolling and abuse, but sometimes when you're facing the shitstream, there's just so much semantic jugglery you can take. No matter what you call it, you just want it off.

And that's where Gandhi's initiative makes sense, as one more pathway to a #SwachhBharat, since we now live both on and offline. But one that'll work only if she can take on her party's trolls. Who are now trolling her too. Yes, cybercells and cops do exist, but that route doesn't always work. Social media platforms make promises to their users, but they are rarely kept. "Not a single tweet that I've ever reported has been taken down," says Rohini Lakshane of the Centre for Internet and Society, who's helping us with our digital security workshop.

This is not only about safety. It's about digital citizenship. Women are neither interlopers nor outsiders online. We belong there just as we belong here. We intend to loiter online full-throated. We're not content with a purely offline #SwachhBharat that cleans rivers and ponds. We want online #SwachhStreams too.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-july-13-2016-bisakha-datta-belling-the-trolls

Behind the scenes of Escort Economy 2.0

praskrishna — 2016-07-01T15:43:36Z

With the government banning over 200 escort sites last week, Sunday Times speaks to the owner of an agency to find out how tech is driving the world's oldest profession.

The article by Sharmila Ganeshan Ram was published in the Times of India on June 26, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

He excuses himself to bark a series of expletives in Hindi, supposedly at a driver. He returns to the phone call and says sorry and that the people he is surrounded by only respond to colourful language. But then, this otherwise patient, English-speaking man, who runs an escort business in Mumbai, also has a more legitimate reason to swear.

Last week, the central government blocked 237 escort websites, among which one (or perhaps more, he won't say) belongs to this man. Understandably, he does not want to be named but it is a surprise he even agreed to talk. Because the question, "How has the government's move of blocking escort websites affected you?" elicits nothing from escort agencies, especially those in other cities, except a meek "I don't know" in Bengaluru to "Madam, ek night spend kar lo mere saath, bata deta hoon." That, of course, came from a man in Delhi.

Most of the Mumbai numbers against names that sound like they belong to female characters from a Karan Johar movie are bound to lead you to a tiny constellation of men, chiefly call-centre workers. If you go as far as asking for their names, you are bound to get some well-deserved lies. "Guru Dutt," answered one of these men in Mumbai.

One call eventually led to this nameless man with an "IT background" who has been running an escort business for six years and does not understand the logic of blocking websites. "If you block one domain, it will pop up in other forms. Also, why block a few websites in one city while not in others?" asks the agency owner.

He says he has lost "almost 90%" of his daily revenue following the government's move. "We used to earn up to Rs 2 lakh a day from just one website. Now, it has come down to Rs 15,000."

As far as the escort economy goes, Mumbai, he says, is a "small town" compared to Delhi, with its many high-profile clients and tony hotels. While he pegs Delhi's daily turnover at Rs 50 crore a day, he says Mumbai's escort industry sees Rs 10 crore a day.

In India, the escort business falls in the murky, grey area between legal and illegal, especially because websites and agencies tend to hide behind words like 'friendship' and 'company' to describe the service and cops can't really arrest them for that.

"The escort is not a criminal. She has the right to gift her body to anyone she pleases. Besides, escort business usually involves accompanying VIPs to important events and may or may not end in sex. I know of VIPs who do not so much as touch the girl. They just want conversation," he says. That's advertised online as GFE or girlfriend experience. Of course, the housewives seeking male escorts when their husbands are not in town want more.

The escorts are mostly models and struggling actors, for whom a shoot may throw up Rs 2,000 a day while an escort job pays between Rs 20,000 and Rs 40,000. "This business helps them sustain their lifestyle and buy clothes and accessories," says the agency owner. "In the movie business, anyway, the casting couch phenomenon exists. She has to compromise and for free. Here, she is getting paid for it," he reasons. Besides models, he says there are several 20-somethings from the corporate world who leave the business after a year or so.

But you soon realize why these cities may not care as much when you trawl through the list of blocked websites released by the Centre for Internet and Society. In this list — which besides 'juicy lips' and 'midnight princess' also includes a curious one called 'sterling bioscience' — you will find that most websites are based in Mumbai. Most of the Mumbai numbers against names that sound like they belong to female characters from a Karan Johar movie are bound to lead you to a tiny constellation of men, chiefly call-centre workers. If you go as far as asking for their names, you are bound to get some well-deserved lies. "Guru Dutt," answered one of these men in Mumbai. One call eventually led to this nameless man with an "IT background" who has been running an escort business for six years and does not understand the logic of blocking websites.

"If you block one domain, it will pop up in other forms. Also, why block a few websites in one city while not in others?" asks the agency owner. He says he has lost "almost 90%" of his daily revenue following the government's move. "We used to earn up to Rs 2 lakh a day from just one website. Now, it has come down to Rs 15,000."As far as the escort economy goes, Mumbai, he says, is a "small town" compared to Delhi, with its many high-profile clients and tony hotels. While he pegs Delhi's daily turnover at Rs 50 crore a day, he says Mumbai's escort industry sees Rs 10 crore a day. In India, the escort business falls in the murky, grey area between legal and illegal, especially because websites and agencies tend to hide behind words like 'friendship' and 'company' to describe the service and cops can't really arrest them for that."

The escort is not a criminal. She has the right to gift her body to anyone she pleases. Besides, escort business usually involves accompanying VIPs to important events and may or may not end in sex. I know of VIPs who do not so much as touch the girl.

They just want conversation," he says. That's advertised online as GFE or girlfriend experience. Of course, the housewives seeking male escorts when their husbands are not in town want more.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-sharmila-ganesan-ram-june-26-2016-behind-the-scenes-of-escort-economy

Behind Modi’s Heartwarming Diwali Ad for Soldiers, An App That’s Primed for Political Messaging

praskrishna — 2016-10-30T07:33:57Z

The campaign, which allows users to send Modi quotes on themes like Ayodhya and the perfidy of the Opposition, raises questions about the boundaries between government, party and personal promotion.

The article by Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty was published in the Wire on October 29, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

On October 22, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a public campaign, Sandesh2Soldiers, urging the people to be a part of it. The prime minister prodded people to express their gratitude to soldiers guarding the borders through the campaign by sending them personalised messages on the occasion of Diwali.

Such messages can be sent through the Narendra Modi mobile app, the “official app of the prime minister”, or by logging on to www.mygov.in, a central government platform launched by the prime minister in 2014 to facilitate participatory governance by engaging the public. One can also send a message by recording it after dialing a 10-digit number – which would then be aired by All India Radio (AIR).

Media reports said a special module had been created within the mobile app to not only enable people to send text messages to soldiers but also to upload handwritten letters, decorated cards and videos to them expressing their Diwali wishes and feelings for the armed forces.

A special video that carried Modi’s appeal to the public to send messages to the armed forces was shared on social media along with a few other videos to promote the prime minister’s idea. One such video features a child sending a ‘thank you rocket’ to soldiers for defending the nation under hostile circumstances. That the call to send a personal message has come from the prime minister has upped the profile of this campaign.

Bollywood stars like Akshay Kumar, Aamir Khan and Salman Khan, and cricketers such as Virat Kohli, Virendra Sehwag and Mohammad Kaif have also posted their messages to soldiers on Twitter by using the prime minister’s campaign hashtag #Sandesh2Soldiers. Many Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) politicians and ministers have also joined in.

As per a tweet by AIR on October 26, “Around 9,800 persons sent their good wishes to jawans of security forces so far during this festive season”. Last checked, www.mygov.in, run by the National Informatics Centre under the the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, showed 13,000 messages and video uploads recorded. The number is going up by the minute.

While the registration requirement at the government’s www.mygov.in portal only requires the sender to provide her or his name and e-mail address to be able to send a message or upload a video – a usual cyber safety procedure – those who want to use the Modi app for the purpose will have to do more: they will first have to agree to be personally profiled by the prime minister’s “official” mobile application.

Personally identifiable information

This is how things work: to register oneself through the app and send a message, a user not only has to disclose her name, mobile number and email address but also profession, the state and the district she belongs to, her voter identification card number, specific areas of interests and a personal description within “500 characters”.

This has left many potential senders and experts flummoxed. Why does a citizen, in order to express her gratitude to the armed forces on the occasion of Diwali at the call of her prime minister need to share additional information with the app, which amounts to profiling? At a time when the Supreme Court is hearing a bunch of petitions on the mandatory use of Aadhar cards by the government, some of which deal with issues of privacy and the possible misuse of the collected data, this is a relevant question.

“There was absolutely no need for the app to ask for additional information from a user just to send a message to the armed forces. As far as the additional information sought from a user is concerned, it allows the data collector to build a profile of the user but it is not profiling in the modern big data sense wherein multiple data sources are combined to create a complete profile of the data subject,” says Sunil Abraham, director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

Abraham adds, “There is no guarantee that the data collected (through the app) won’t be used illegally by some commercial enterprise, etc. because our data protection law, Section 43A of the Information and Technology Act, doesn’t apply to the state but only to the private sector. In other words, if the personal information is shared with the government, then it is perfectly legal for the government to disclose the personal information to other government or commercial entities.”

Unlike the MyGov portal, where a user can type or upload a message, the Narendra Modi mobile app also automatically adds a quote from the prime minister below the one typed by the user. It expresses the prime minister’s pride over “the indomitable valour and supreme sacrifice of our armed forces etched in the memory of every Indian”.

The prime minister launched his official mobile app in August last year at a function reportedly organised by MyGov, thus making him the first prime minister to have a mobile app named after him. Designed by a team of six students from Delhi Technical University after winning a two-phased contest launched by MyGov in March last year, the app has been described as “a one-stop destination for knowing about all the latest day-to-day activities of the prime minister.”As per media reports, the app would correspond to the prime minister’s official website, www.pmindia.gov.in.

Obviously then, information on how to access the app and take part in the campaign have been publicised through his portal, www.pmindia.gov.in.

This raises another question. Even though www.pmindia.gov.in is not directly accepting public messages for the armed forces but is only promoting the campaign and giving information on how to download the mobile app for it (thereby proving that it corresponds to the app), it does direct an interested user to the prime minister’s personal website, www.narendramodi.in on clicking its publicity window designed for the campaign.

The user can then download the Modi app from his personal website, which was used extensively during the run-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections by Modi to reach out to voters. So the app not only corresponds to the official website of the prime minister but also with his personal website through the official website. Curiously, it is not possible to access the app from the MyGov portal even though the entity under the Ministry of Electronics and Information launched the app at a function on August 6 in New Delhi reportedly organised by it.

Thus, while the app that seemed to have been developed and launched by a government department can’t be accessed directly through a government portal, it can be accessed through the prime minister’s personal portal. Also, features in the app like “forget password” are handled by his personal website, which communicates with an app user as its “Admin”.

So who runs the app? Is it not the official app of the prime minister of the country? Who owns it? Is it his personal app that he considers “official”? These are questions to which answers are not easily available.

No answers

The Wire made multiple attempts to get an official response, both from the government and the BJP Cyber Cell, about these queries but failed to get an answer. The Wire also failed to get any official clarification to why the app seeks personal details of a user to just send messages to the armed forces.

Calls and text messages to the social media cell of the Press Information Bureau (PIB) – the government’s media interface in the digital space – the office of Anurag Jain, listed in the www.pmindia.gov.in as the “web information office”, and to MyGov, which launched the app at the second anniversary function of the Modi government on August 6 last year in New Delhi, failed to receive a reply. All that a PIB official was willing to say on condition of anonymity to this correspondent, “I think it has been outsourced, we don’t deal with it. May be you can contact the PMO.”

Anurag Jain’s office at the PMO said, “You won’t get any information here on the app and the response of the people for the campaign through it. Call the appointments section, it might know.” But that section didn’t respond.

A mail sent to Arvind Gupta of the BJP’s Cyber Cell too has so far remained unanswered. A BJP source, however, pointed out, “If you go to @narendramodi_in, it clearly mentions that it is the twitter account of narendramodi.in, the personal website of Narendra Modi and also of the Narendra Modi mobile app. So it is his personal app.”

The question of why a personal app of the prime minister is then called his “official” app remains unanswered. Also, why is it then that the bulk text messages sent by a government entity, MyGov, direct the public to the prime minister’s personal app to send a message to the armed forces? Is it personal or official?

Meanwhile, the traffic directed by the prime minister’s official website to his personal portal can make use of the e-greeting section in it to send a Diwali e-card to family, relatives, colleagues, etc.

To send such an e-card, the user needs to follow four mandatory steps – choosing a card from the available options, selecting a pre-written Diwali message; selecting a quote of the prime minister from an exhaustive list made available to the user, and adding the name, salutation and email address of the recipient of the card.

The list of quotes – in English and Hindi – have been culled out of the prime minister’s speeches that straddle a variety of categories including Pakistan, terrorism, ASEAN, Nepal, Bhutan, Swacchh Bharat mission, the idea of India, secularism, disability, caste, dalits, governance, yoga, youth, et al.

It also has “motivation” as a category of prime minister’s sayings. Clicking it will give a user the choice of a long list of the prime minister’s quotes which begins with the need for the world to recognise the sacrifice made by Indian soldiers in the two world wars and ends with a quote on the 2010 judgment given by the Allahabad high court on the disputed site at Ayodhya:

Diwali greetings that can be sent along with the prime minister’s quote on the Ayodhya judgement which has been stayed by the Supreme Court

The quote said, “The Ayodhya judgment will work as a catalyst to maintain peace and unity in the country. This judgment has given a respect to belief and self esteem of the people of India, and it should be linked to self esteem of the country.”

Reacting to the judgment in 2010, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat had expressed “satisfaction”, adding, “The judgment has paved the way for the construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya. The judgment is not a win or loss for anybody. We invite everybody, including Muslims, to help build the temple.”

Constructing the Ram temple in Ayodhya was also in the manifesto of the BJP for the 2014 Lok Sabha polls with Modi as the party’s prime ministerial candidate.

So, even if the Supreme Court had put a stay on the judgment and has been hearing some petitions for and against it, this Diwali, if you wish to send an e-card using that quote of the prime minister to express his mind on the issue, you can.

“I think it is not only improper of the prime minister to allow such a quote to feature in an e-card with his name but it is also contempt of court. Being the prime minister of the country, he has to maintain neutrality. As per the constitution, there is separation of the state from religion. So being the prime minister, he can’t possibly allow someone to use that quote of him,” says well-known constitutional expert and senior Supreme Court lawyer Rajeev Dhavan.

Dhavan points out a precedent: “In 1969, the Supreme Court held as contempt a comment made by the then West Bengal chief minister P.C. Sen in a speech aired by All India Radio. The speech was made at a time when someone had challenged an order of the state government on milk production. Sen’s adverse comment supporting the order was presented first in front of the West Bengal High Court which took cognisance of it and termed it contempt of court. Thereafter, the case came to the SC which also termed it contempt of court as the comment was made while the case was pending in the court.”

Swaying public opinion

As per media reports, the comment on the September 30, 2010, HC order was made by Modi, then the Gujarat chief minister, on the same day, before the SC stayed that order in May, 2011.

Dhavan felt, “That he, as the prime minister, is now openly allowing a user to circulate that quote after the SC has begun hearing the case will attract criminal contempt of court as it can be seen as interfering with the working of the judiciary. He can obviously affect public opinion and can be seen as trying to decide the question. It can be seen as usurping the function of the Judiciary by the Executive.”

The traffic directed by the prime minister’s official website to the personal portal can also make use of any Diwali e-greeting card by picking a quote from a category named “political-general”. Many of the quotes under that category are from the prime minister’s multiple attacks on the main opposition party, the Congress, some of which must have been made before the 2014 Lok Sabha polls, such as this one: “The UPA government is non-serious, it has taken the people for granted & it is not bothered about the youth. Their approach shows lack of faith in democracy. Our goal is to win the trust of the people & give dignity to them…”

“That the prime minister’s official website links people to surf his personal website where they can send e-cards using anti-opposition quotes of the prime minister is extremely contentious. Whichever party had come to power, there has always been a Chinese wall between the institution of the prime minister and the politician. Unfortunately, both have come together in the current dispensation. The common man doesn’t understand it well, so it is taking advantage of technology to erase that difference,” former Information and Broadcasting minister and Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari said.

Such e-cards are not restricted to Diwali. You can send them on occasions like “Holi, Rakshabandhan, Navaratri, Christmas, Independence Day, Gudi Padwa, Kite Festival, Namo Birthday, Ram Navami, Swami Vivekananda Janma Jayanti” and at any other time by opting for the “political (general)” category.

Narendra Modi implemented the idea of launching e-cards that could go with his quotes in the run-up to the 2014 parliamentary elections. Reports said that “Narendra Modi E-cards” were used by the BJP as a “new marketing strategy” to canvas for its prime ministerial candidate before Holi to bypass the Election Commission of India’s model code of conduct as there was “no mention of rules for social media usage by political parties”.

Meanwhile, those who have signed up for the Narendra Modi mobile app only to send a message to the armed forces have begun receiving regular “infographics” based on the prime minister’s speeches, and also data culled out of news and study reports that are deemed favourable to him and his government. A registered user can further pass on those “infographics” by sharing them on her Facebook page and twitter handle.

The app, though termed “official”, also forwards to a registered user tweets posted only from his personal twitter handle and not from his official handle, @pmoindia. One such tweet that this correspondent received through the app had little to do with the government and entirely with the persona of the politician behind the prime minister. The tweet said, “When @narendramodi demonstrated true leadership at the Patna rally, on this day in 2013…”

Clicking on the link in the tweet takes you to a write-up that talks of the “true grit” of the “BJP’s then prime ministerial candidate” by addressing a rally after a bomb blast in Patna.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-wire-october-29-2016-sangeeta-barooah-pisharoty-behind-modis-heartwarming-diwal-ad-for-soldiers-an-app-that-is-primed-for-political-messaging