We are anonymous, we are legion

CIS Response to Call for Stakeholder Comments: Draft E-Commerce Policy

Arindrajit Basu, Vipul Kharbanda, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha — 2019-04-10T12:12:43Z

CIS is grateful for the opportunity to submit to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion comments to the draft National e-commerce policy.

The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion released a draft e-commerce policy in February for which stakeholder comments were sought. CIS responded to the request for comments.

The full text can be accessed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-response-to-call-for-stakeholder-comments-draft-e-commerce-policy

DIDP #33 On ICANN's 2012 gTLD round auction fund

akriti — 2019-07-09T15:51:47Z

This DIDP was filed to inquire about the state of the funds ICANN received from the last gTLD auctions.

In 2012, after years of deliberation ICANN opened the application round for new top level domains and saw over 1930 applications. Since October 2013, delegation of these extensions commenced with it still going on. However, 7 years since the round was open there has been no consensus on how to utilize the funds obtained from the auctions. ICANN until its last meeting was debating on the legal mechanisms/ entities to be created who will decide on the disbursement of these funds. There is no clear information on how those funds have been maintained over the years or its treatments in terms of whether they have been set aside or invested etc. Thus, our DIDP questions ICANN on the status of these funds and can be found here.

The response to the DIDP received on 24th April, 2019 states that that even though the request asked for information, rather than documentation, our question was answered. Reiterating that the DIDP mechanism was developed to provide documentation rather than information. It stated that on 25 October 2018, Resolution 2018.10.25.23 was passed that compels the President and CEO to allocate $36 million to the Reserve Fund. The gTLD auction proceeds were allocated to separate investment accounts, and the interest accruing from the proceedings was in accordance with the new gTLD Investment Policy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-april-4-2019-didp-33-on-icann-s-2012-gtld-round-auction-fund

The Phantom Public: The Role of Social Media in Democracy

Admin — 2019-05-01T05:09:19Z

Amber Sinha delivered an open lecture at Ambedkar University, New Delhi on 3 April 2019.

India has over 500 million internet users — over a third of its total population — making it the country with the second largest number of Internet users after China. For the world’s largest democracy, the Internet should be a boon. After all, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, had envisioned the Internet to as an “open platform that allows anyone to share information, access opportunities and collaborate across geographical boundaries.” The democratization of information it facilitated should have led to a more informed citizenry, but instead what we have is the complete opposite. The average digital citizen in India maintains a near perpetual information illiteracy about where they receive news and information from, whether or not it is true and how it is intended to manipulate them. This is, in large part, because social media has become the primary source of information.

The problems of the public, how it may get access to meaningful information, how it organises itself, and how public opinion is shaped are now deeply impacted by the rise of social media and messaging platforms as political tools of targeting, gathering and organising. How this new media thwarts and enables the goals of the public in India at present is the primary subject matter of this talk. We will cover a range of issues such as fake news and hate speech on social media, the use Facebook by Cambridge Analytica in elections, and how online platforms are governed, particularly with a view towards elections.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-phantom-public-the-role-of-social-media-in-democracy

CIS Response to Draft E-Commerce Policy

amber — 2019-04-26T06:40:34Z

CIS is grateful for the opportunity to submit comments to the Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion on the draft national e-commerce policy. This response was authored by Amber Sinha, Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Vipul Kharbanda.

Access our response to the draft policy here: Download (PDF)

The E-Commerce Policy is a much needed and timely document that seeks to enable the growth of India's digital ecosystem. Crucially, it backs up India's stance at the WTO, which has been a robust pushback against digital trade policies that would benefit the developed world at the cost of emerging economies. However, in order to ensure that the benefits of the digital economy are truly shared, focus must not only be on the sellers but also on the consumers, which automatically brings in individual rights into the question. No right is absolute but there needs to be a fair trade-off between the mercantilist aspirations of a burgeoning digital economy and the civil and political rights of the individuals who are spurring the economy on. We also appreciate the recognition that the regulation of e-commerce must be an inter-disciplinary effort and the assertion of the roles of various other departments and ministries. However, we also caution against over-reach and encroaching into policy domains that fall within the mandate of existing laws.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-response-to-draft-e-commerce-policy

Now, police use apps to catch a criminal

Ketaki Desai — 2019-03-31T15:47:00Z

Recently, Punjab police detained three suspects on a tip-off. The cops clicked their photographs, uploaded them on an app called the Punjab Artificial Intelligence System or PAIS which uses facial recognition, and immediately got the lowdown on their criminal history, which involved a contract killing and looting. Four stolen vehicles and five weapons were recovered from them.

The article by Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma in Chandigarh was published in the Times of India on March 31, 2019. Arindrajit Basu was quoted.

Police forces around the country are increasingly relying on artificial intelligence as both a crime-busting and prevention tool despite concerns about the inbuilt biases of algorithms, and the worry that policing may win over privacy.

Atul Rai, founder CEO of Gurgaon-based firm Staqu Technologies, which developed the app used by Punjab police, says they collect data from various state agencies and have built a database on criminals. “An NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) report showed that 70% of crimes are committed by repeat criminals. Our facial recognition software works even on low-resolution photos and videos.” Police departments in UP, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan are armed with similar apps. And how likely is it that this facial recognition tech makes mistakes? It has 98% accuracy, claims Rai.

Other companies are also in the fray. Chennai’s FaceTagr has built a database of 75,000 photographs, and claims its app – currently being used in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Puducherry – is able to identify faces with an accuracy of 99.4%.

Facial recognition doesn’t just help catch the bad guys, it can also help trafficked kids reunite with their families. Vijay Gnanadesikan, CEO of FaceTagr, says they have begun to work with the Indian Railways to facilitate this. “Often, a child is not able to tell police officers where they are from. Now if a child is reported missing in Mumbai, and found in Bengaluru, the parents can be found if both police departments upload his or her photo.”

UP’s Trinetra app, developed by Staqu Tech, was launched in December, 2018. I-G (crime) S K Bhagat says, “We didn’t have any centralised criminal database in UP before this.” The app informs the cops of the status of each person in custody, and whether they are out on bail. This means that if a chain-snatching takes place in Lucknow, they can filter suspects and also show the victim their photos for identification. “Right now we’re in the first phase of using the app; beat officers still don’t yet have direct access but their SHO does.” To prevent misuse, a centralised monitoring system has been developed.

Staqu also offers predictive analytics— they collect data from news sites and blogs, aggregate information about crime patterns across the country, and create a ‘heat map’ for law enforcement agencies. Using this, they are able to make predictions about where, how and by whom a crime might be committed.

But predictive policing is problematic, points out Vidushi Marda of human rights organisation Article 19. “Data is often imperfect, and it’s easy for a deeply unequal, biased outlook of society to be embedded in data. This means that people who have always been arrested for no reason will continue to be arrested for no reason. And because it’s an algorithm, we can’t refute it,” she says.

Uncanny Vision, a Bengaluru-based company, makes smart CCTVs that are deployed in ATMs and number plate readers that are used on national highways in Kerala to curb speeding. Co-founder Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy says, “Our ATM CCTVs don’t use facial recognition, they just look at the actions. We take the video, convert it into information and toss away the video.” He thinks that privacy concerns are important. “Is it possible for the government to use it in any big-brother scenario? Yes, but that has always been the case. With this technology, we can control who has access to the information that comes from CCTVs, and there is a clear footprint about who has accessed the information,” he says.

Apar Gupta, executive director of the Internet Freedom Foundation, points out that there are no regulatory safeguards in place. “The first thing surveillance needs is a statutory framework—what is its purpose, how is it being carried out, and what limits they cannot go beyond. These surveillance systems are being made without adequate civil society engagement. There needs to be a third-party data protection authority to audit their activities.”

Arindrajit Basu, senior policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, says the advantages of AI in tracking crime have to be balanced with accountability. “The government can be taken to court for violation of a fundamental right, including the recently recognised right to privacy. But, most of this tech is being rolled out in collaboration with private actors. You can’t take a private company to court for this.” The solution might lie in private companies sharing liability with the government, he says. “That will ensure that they consider the ethical consequences of their products.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-march-31-2019-ketaki-desai-now-police-use-apps-to-catch-a-criminal

IETF 104 Prague

Admin — 2019-04-12T01:04:47Z

Karan Saini and Gurshabad Grover participated in IETF 104 organized by IETF in Prague from 23rd March to 29th March 2019.

Karan Saini:

Attended and scribed for the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Proposed Research Group (PEARG) session.
Attended and made interventions in the Stopping Malware and Researching Threats (SMART RG) research group session.
Attended: DNS Over HTTPS (DOH), Domain Name System Operations (DNSOP), Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Authentication and Authorization for Constrained Environments (ACE WG) group sessions
Attended side meetings: Public Interest Technology (PITG) and Web Packaging (webpack)

Gurshabad Grover:

Attended and made interventions in the Captive Portals (capport) and Registration Protocols Extensions (regext) working groups. Also attended the meetings of the Transport Layer Security (TLS), DNS Privacy, and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) working groups and the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Proposed Research Group (PEARG). Additionally, attended the Public Interest Technology Group (PITG) and Centralisation of DNS Services side meetings.
At the meeting of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC) research group, I presented an update to draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines ('Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and Architecture Considerations'), which I am co-editing with Niels ten Oever.
At the IETF Hackathon, I explored the use of differential privacy for privacy-preserving latency measurement in the QUIC protocol (with Amelia Andersdotter and Shivan Kaul Sahib). We will continue the research to see whether differential privacy techniques are viable/useful for IETF protocols.
Attended and made interventions in the Captive Portals (capport) andRegistration Protocols Extensions (regext) working groups. Also attended the meetings of the Transport Layer Security (TLS), DNS Privacy, and DNS over HTTPS (DoH) working groups and the Privacy Enhancements and Assessments Proposed Research Group (PEARG). Additionally, attended the Public Interest Technology Group (PITG) and Centralisation of DNS Services side meetings.
At the meeting of the Human Rights Protocol Considerations (HRPC)research group, I presented an update to draft-irtf-hrpc-guidelines('Guidelines for Human Rights Protocol and ArchitectureConsiderations'), which I am co-editing with Niels ten Oever.
At the IETF Hackathon, I explored the use of differential privacy forprivacy-preserving latency measurement in the QUIC protocol (with Amelia Andersdotter and Shivan Kaul Sahib). We will continue the research to see whether differential privacy techniques are viable/useful for IETF protocols.

For more information visit IETF website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ietf-104-prague

March 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-07-18T02:14:11Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for the month of March 2019.

Highlights for March 2019

The Indian Patent Office (IPO) on 1 March 2019, published a draft of the “Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure, Version 3.0”. CIS provided comments on patenting of computer related inventions.
The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team has submitted its proposal for the year 2019-2020 to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS-A2K has proposed to undertake content enrichment, skill development initiatives, cement partnership with existing partners and build relationships with new ones, and activities like Train-the-Trainer, Wikisource Conference, Wikimedia Summit India, Intensive Personal Wiki Training, supporting Indic Wikimedians through request page, etc.
Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organisation working on rejuvenation of rivers in India, has began documentation of rivers on Wiki, especially to draw attention to and mitigate the crisis of toxic deposits facing more than 40 rivers in India. The work was started by Jal Biradari, TBS’s Maharashtra based group, in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team of CIS. A report from the first pilot workshop conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, in Alwar, Rajasthan has been published.
With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. Saumyaa Naidu in a report has shared the learningsfrom the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.
Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok co-authored a policy brief titled Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India. The policy brief has recommended changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding external vulnerability reporting and disclosure.
Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla co-authored a White Paper titled 'The Localisation Gambit'. The paper was edited by Pranav M.B., Vipul Kharbanda and Amber Sinha. Anjanaa Aravindan provided research assistance. Government of India has drafted multiple policy instruments which dictate that certain types of data must be stored in servers located physically within the territory of India. The White Paper serves as a resource for stakeholders attempting to intervene in this debate and arrive at a workable solution where the objectives of data localisation are met through measures that have the least negative impact on India’s economic, political, and legal interests.
The Technology Law Forum at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) has published the Report on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium.This report is a compilation of all the speakers' speeches during the panel discussion. Shweta Mohandas was one of the eight speakers at the panel and the excerpts from her presentation has also been covered in this report.
CIS in its r@w blog featured an essay titled 'Users and the Internet' by Purbasha Auddy, part of a series on Studying Internet in India (2015); and audio recording of a session titled #SelfiesFromtheField which was part of the Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.

Jobs

CIS is hiring:

CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application (Only women candidates).
Internship - applications accepted throughout the year.

CIS and the News

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

Recapturing the Commons (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 7, 2019).
Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 10, 2019).
Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 24, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Why entrepreneurs are wary of the new draft e-commerce policy (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; March 3, 2019).
'Website not found' pop-ups leave net activists fuming (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; March 6, 2019).
More urban Indian women are acting against offensive calls and text messages (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 8, 2019).
Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a ghost town for political ads in India so far (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 12, 2019).

Wie die chinesische Mega-App TikTok Indiens Wahlkampf beeinflussen könnte (Handelsblatt; March 13, 2019).
When laugh lines turn worry lines (K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj; Hindu; March 15, 2019).

Proposed Intermediary Liability Rules threat to privacy and free speech, global coalition tells MeitY (Zaheer Merchant; Medianama; March 18, 2019).
Now, police use apps to catch a criminal (Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma; Times of India; March 31, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

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

Copyright and Patent

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

Submission

Comments and Suggestions to the Draft Patent Manual March 2019 (Achal Prabhala, Feroz Ali, Ramya Sheshadri, Roshan John and Anubha Sinha; March 21, 2019).

Wikipdedia

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

Blog Entries

Train the Trainer program 2018 (Sailesh Patnaik; March 6, 2019).
The city of Bhubaneswar is going Open (Sailesh Patnaik; March 7, 2019).
Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way (Subodh Kulkarni; March 7, 2019).
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಶಿಕ್ಷಣ ಯೋಜನೆ ಸಮಾವೇಶ ಮತ್ತು ತರಬೇತಿಯ ವರದಿ (Ananth Subray; March 7, 2019).
Design and the Open Knowledge Movement (Saumyaa Naidu; March 31, 2019).

Event Organized

Wikimedia Summit India 2019 (Organized by CIS-A2K; New Delhi; March 16 - 17, 2019). CIS-A2K team organized a two-day Wikimedia Summit event for the participants taking part in the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin.

Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Event Organized

Talks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young (Organized by CIS; Bangalore; March 4, 2019).

Internet Governance

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

Cyber Security

Research Paper

Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India (Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok; March 20, 2019). This is an update to our previously released paper titled "Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India". The full document can be accessed here.

Privacy

Research Paper

The Localisation Gambit: Unpacking policy moves for the sovereign control of data in India (Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla; March 19, 2019).

Participation in Events

Nullcon Security Conference (Organized by Nullcon; March 1 - 2, 2019; Goa). Karan Saini attended the event.
Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond” (Organized by TRAI; Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennaii; March 15, 2019).
DSCI-Infosys Roundtable (Organized by Infosys; Bangalore; March 25, 2019). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Free Speech and Expression

Event

Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy (Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 5, 2019).

Participation in Event

Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World (Organized by Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World and its partners; Bangkok; March 25 - 27, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Artificial Intelligence, ICT and IoT

Participation in Events

RFCs We Love: Transport & Apps Edition (Organized by India Internet Engineering Society; March 2, 2019; Go-Jek; Domlur, Bangalore). Gurshabad Grover was a speaker at this event.
Consultation on Draft E-commerce Policy (Organized by Alternative Law Forum and IT for Change; March 14, 2019; Tony Hall, Ashirwad , Off St.Marks Road; Bangalore). Arindrajit Basu attended the event.
International Conference on Justice Education:Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence (Organized by Nirma University; Ahmedabad; March 15 - 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu attended the conference.
AI for India Summit (Organized by Facebook; Leela Palace, Bengaluru; March 26, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event.
Roundtable on Consumer Experiences with New Technologies in APAC (Singapore) (Organized by Consumers International; Google, Singapore; March 26, 2019). Arindrajit Basu participated in the event.

Researchers at Work (RAW)

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

Blog Entries

#CollectionAndIdentity (Ravi Shukla, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Mrutyunjay Mishra; March 2, 2019).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; March 2, 2019).
Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi (Sarah McKeever; March 12, 2019).
#CampusCampaigns: User Perceptions in Pre-digital and Digital Eras (Arjun Ghosh; March 12, 2019).
Taking Open Science Offline (Shreyashi Ray; March 21, 2019).

Participation in Event

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium (Organized by Michigan State University; March 21 - 22, 2019). P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives.

About CIS

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

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► Support Us

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

► Request for Collaboration

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

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

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

Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World

Admin — 2019-04-05T14:22:07Z

Anubha Sinha participated in a JNC workshop organized by Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World and its partners in Bangkok from March 25 to 27, 2019.

Background

Digital is increasingly the substratum of much of social, economic and political activities, marking the advent of what has been called as the digital society and economy. While it does promise the advancement of human civilisation in many ways – enabling unimagined efficiencies of resource utilisation and new forms of intelligent social and economic organisation and functioning, these gains are not automatic. This is especially so regarding whether the benefits of a digital society and economy will be equitably distributed, or if data enabled pervasive digital intelligence will get employed by the powerful to further entrench their controls over the rest. It is a telling fact that the last decade and half of the rise of the Internet and digital were also the times of one of the fastest ever worsening of inequality worldwide. If the deep social, economic and political troubles currently faced by the world are any evidence, we may not be employing the newly available digitally intelligent means for better management of our societies and economies.

Governments, that are supposed to ensure appropriate economic distribution and social justice, are completely at a loss with regard to the digital society/economy phenomenon, and leave it to big – mostly global – business to advice and lead them. Even among civil society, while there exist many groups and networks advocating for the very important civil and political rights in a digital era, there is hardly any presence and work related to corresponding economic and social rights and justice. This has resulted in a singular homogeneous global digital economy discourse which is not just hegemonic – as admittedly happens in other areas as well – but also remains almost entirely uncontested, without any alternatives articulated even at its peripheries. It is underpinned by the neoliberal tenets of seamless techno-enabled economic globalisation, open unregulated markets (but actually monopoly corporate controls), and individual merit and personal responsibility. Productivity and inclusion are both sold as assured outcomes of imbibing digital technologies into everything.

For more info, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/just-net-coalition-workshop-on-equity-and-social-justice-in-a-digital-world

AI for India Summit

Admin — 2019-04-04T16:31:21Z

Shweta Mohandas attended this event held on March 26, 2019 at Leela Palace in Bengaluru. The event was organized by Facebook.

For more info, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-ai-for-india-summit

Roundtable on Consumer Experiences with New Technologies in APAC (Singapore)

Admin — 2019-04-15T10:25:57Z

Arindrajit Basu was invited to a Roundtable on Artificial Intelligence:Consumer Experiences with New Technologies (APAC region).

The event was hosted by Consumer International and delivered at Google, Singapore on March 26, 2019. CIS research and Arindrajit's inputs have been quoted in a report by the same name which will be released by Consumer International within the course of the next month.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/roundtable-on-consumer-experiences-with-new-technologies-in-apac-singapore

DSCI-Infosys Roundtable

Admin — 2019-04-05T02:06:00Z

Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting organized by Infosys in Bangalore on March 25, 2019 as a speaker.

AGENDA:

10:00-10:15 AM	Opening Remarks: Infosys Context Setting: DSCI and Infosys
10:15- 11:00 AM	Elements shaping Data Economy § Digitization: Personalization, Experience, Productivity & Possibilities § Global Internet Platforms: Transforming B2C and B2B § Phantomization of Technology & Business Models § Changing nature of Deliveries: value driven, subscription based and platform based § Product Economy: Data-centric Designs, Start-ups and Unicorn, § IOT and Industrialisation 4.0: Next generation service & business lines § Data flow and how it’s shaping trade of goods and services § Role of data in delivering the public service and improving public order § Artificial Intelligence: at specific product/service level and its ramification to industrial and national economy § Technology: role of data in developing next generation tech platforms Discussion Facilitation: DSCI and Infosys
11:00- 11:45 AM	Tech’s Dilemmas § Scale and reach of BigTech: Industrial Capitalism versus Internet Capitalism § Competition § Influence on personal, social, transactional, economic and political life § Stressed relations with values of modern value system § Ethical issues: human rights, social harmony, public space decency, health electoral processes, information warfare... § Data Privacy § Tech’s response: Locking down of data, editorial/ censorship controls... § Challenges of law enforcement, fraud management and supervision § Relevance to national security objectives ...... § Principles of Responsible Innovation § Ideas under discussion/ experimentation Discussion Facilitation: DSCI and Infosys
11:45-12:15 AM	Shaping Data Economy § Structures and approaches: state controlled, private sector led, decentralized § Directions: legal/ policy, innovation, investments, architectures (like India Stack), § Searching the role of liberal economic principles § Open architectures and open data ecosystem § Positions, Obligations, Burdens and Liabilities for protecting rights, creating level playing field, ensuring competition... § Regulatory approaches: establishing supervisory controls § National security: Interventions, mandates and cooperation Discussion Facilitation: DSCI and Infosys
12:15 to 12:30 PM	Discussion Summary
12:30 PM onwards	Lunch

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/dsci-infosys-roundtable

Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium Report

Admin — 2019-04-05T02:24:09Z

The Technology Law Forum at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) has published the Report on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium.

This report is a compilation of all the speakers' speeches during the panel discussion. Shweta Mohandas was one of the eight speakers at the panel and the excerpts from her presentation has also been covered in this report. Click to read more

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/data-privacy-and-citizens-rights-symposium-report

When laugh lines turn worry lines

K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj — 2019-03-20T16:06:46Z

Trolls instil fear in cartoonists’ minds.

The article by K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj was published in Hindu on March 15, 2019. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The election season, with all its colour and drama, had been a festival for political cartooning. But no longer so. Cartoonists, especially those using social media platforms to publish their works, say they are under siege by a polarised electorate.

Several cartoonists have reported instances of their work being taken down from social media platforms and their accounts blocked after they were flagged by users for “offensive content, abuse and nudity”. They allege that while they have been experiencing a “tough time” with right-wing trolls over cartoons critical of the BJP, the situation has become worse in the run-up to the Lok Sabha election.

P. Mahmud, a senior political cartoonist from Karnataka, has been locked out of his Facebook account for a week. His cartoon on March 8 portraying demonetisation and GST as an air strike on the economy went viral on social media, but it was later pulled down after it was allegedly flagged for offensive content. Shorty after, his account was locked. “This is an attack on my freedom of expression, robbing me of a platform,” Mr. Mahmud said. Another work of his, critical of Masood Azhar, founder of the terrorist organisation Jaish-e-Mohammed, was reported for hurting religious sentiments as he had called it Jaish rather than by its full name. A user reported it as an attempt at “obfuscating the religion of terror”.

“I can take criticism. But this campaign against my work seems organised and connected to my religion as well,” Mr. Mahmud said.

Another senior cartoonist from the State, Satish Acharya, had to lodge a complaint with the Udupi police recently when a right-wing troll threatened to “teach him a lesson in public”.

“I have had my Facebook account blocked thrice over the past five years. Each time it was mass reported over cartoons critical of the Modi Sarkar [government]. It’s part of a deliberate strategy to ensure that critical perspective doesn’t find currency online,” he said.

Senior cartoonists Tanmay Tyagi from Delhi and Mumbai-based Manjul have had similar experiences. Mr. Tyagi’s social media handles have been suspended over six times since 2014. Last year, his personal computer was shacked and 20 years of work deleted.

Cartoonists are worried about this concerted effort to muzzle them. Manjul expressed sorrow over the lack of space for nuance, wit, sarcasm, irony and satire — tools that a cartoonist relies on to get their message across.

“You are branded and pigeon-holed in a world that seems to operate on a ‘you are either with us or with them’ narrative. In a polarised society readers look for a confirmation bias in the cartoons,” he said.

A steady stream of abusive comments is a daily reality for cartoonists. “These trolls seek to enter your mind and create fear so that the next time a cartoonist sits at his table to sketch, he will rethink what he draws. It’s aimed at self-censorship,” Mr. Acharya said. He believes that traditional media houses are also developing cold feet.

Sunil Abraham, executive director, Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based research organisation, termed it a “private censorship regime” that was also opaque.

“At most of the social media platforms the function is done partly by machine and partly in person. No company has invested heavily on human resources to review content being reported, making most of the process automated. Once you know what patterns the machine is looking for, you can game the machine and provide such patterns. It is an attack on freedom of expression,” he said.

Last year, Facebook made a detailed document on its internal community standard policy public explaining the nature of the content it takes down. An email questionnaire to the company on its redressal system especially when posts are being falsely flagged for nudity went unanswered.

But is trolling a new phenomenon or restricted to just right-wing supporters? Manjul said the first time he faced this kind of censorship was in 2013 when Twitter took down one of his cartoons critical of the Congress.

His recent cartoon on Triple Talaq received much flak and a Muslim organisation called up the editor of the publication threatening to kill him.

“My cartoon of Lord Ganesha taking a taxi during the Surat Plague got me a barrage of hate mail in 1994. It’s an old disease, but the wound is now in the open and it is rotting. Right-wing trolls are more organised, tech savvy and nasty in their use of language,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-kv-aditya-bharadwaj-march-15-2019-when-laugh-lines-turn-worry-lines

Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a ghost town for political ads in India so far

Aria Thaker — 2019-03-20T16:02:15Z

India’s politicians and political parties don’t seem to be buying ads on Twitter just yet, even as parties are pumping money into Facebook advertising.

The article by Aria Thaker was published in Quartz India on March 12, 2019. Elonnai Hickok was quoted.

As of yesterday (March 11), Indian content is now visible on Twitter’s Ad Transparency Centre: an archive that displays promoted tweets that have been run over the past week. Quartz searched the archive’s records to see if it showed any ads being run by major politicians and political parties, and could not find a single one. (The archive only permits you to search accounts individually—not to click to see all campaign ads at once. Quartz’s manual searches of dozens of politicians and political accounts did not yield any results, however.)

The only accounts seen to have run ads related to politics were media organisations, like television channel Times Now and news aggregation startup Dailyhunt.

Twitter has rolled out the initiative as part of its attempts to boost transparency ahead of India’s upcoming general election. Political campaign ads in the archive, Twitter says, will be accompanied by details about the demographics of audiences they are targeting. And if any promoted tweet is found to have violated Twitter’s rules, the transparency centre will list that it was suspended, and why.

Two days ago, the chief commissioner of the Election Commission of India (ECI) said that Twitter, along with Google, Facebook, and Youtube, has promised to ensure that all political ads on its platform will need to be pre-approved by the poll body’s media certification and monitoring panel.

In order to run political campaign ads, Twitter’s political content policy requires organisations to submit certain identification documents.

“The Transparency Ad Centre along with the Political Content Policy is a welcome step to bringing transparency to promoted and political promoted tweets,” Elonnai Hickock, chief operating officer of the Indian think tank The Centre for Internet and Society, told Quartz. “Going forward, it will be important to see how the system is enforced—identifying, categorising, and tagging content and accounts in violation of this framework.”

The Facebook comparison

While Twitter so far remains a ghost town for political ads, Facebook, which recently rolled out its own ad archive in India, is far from it. Many politics-related pages have spent handsomely on Facebook ads. In Facebook’s ad archive report for the period between February and March 2019, a total of more than Rs4.1 crore ($588,000) was spent on politics-related advertising. Around 70% of this advertising so far has come from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and BJP-affiliated groups.

Favouring Facebook over Twitter seems a rational choice, in most ways. Twitter has less than 35 million users in India, according to statistics portal Statista, while Facebook is thought to have around 300 million.

Twitter is also often thought of as an echo chamber for English-speaking elites—not the grassroots population. Those constituents are generally considered far more reachable through other technological means, including via Facebook, SMS, and WhatsApp.

Translucent, more than transparent

While it may yet be early to determine the overall usefulness of Twitter’s ad transparency centre, the simple comparison with Facebook’s archive shows several areas in which the microblogging platform could stand to be more transparent.

For general, non-political advertising, Twitter’s archive only displays promoted tweets that have run over the course of the past seven days. It is not clear what Twitter’s rationale is for cutting off access to ads after a week passes.

But for politics-related promoted tweets, Twitter plans to display the ads as well as targeting information indefinitely. “All certified political accounts on Twitter will have their ads displayed indefinitely on the Ads Transparency Center. Other information such as billing details, spend, targeting, etc. will also remain indefinitely,” a Twitter spokesperson clarified to Quartz.

The transparency centre also only includes promoted tweets—not in-stream video ads, which are another form of promoted content that can be used in India. “We are working to include other ad formats in the future,” Twitter’s frequently-asked-question section on the transparency centre reads.

But perhaps the most significant hindrance to genuine research on the transparency centre is the fact that it, unlike Facebook’s ad archive, cannot be searched for specific key terms used in ads. For example, while Facebook’s archive allows you to search for all ads that mention the words “prime minister Narendra Modi,” there is no way to run such a query on Twitter’s archive.

To see what politics-related ads are being run in India, one has to manually search through the ads from relevant accounts. The major issue with this is that, especially when it comes to social media advertising, it is not always political parties’ official accounts that run the most aggressive, or the most worrisome, advertising.

Say, for example, a little-known account—an unverified one, which is not outwardly affiliated with any particular politicians—started to run polarising, religion-related ads that helped a particular party. Twitter’s portal would not provide a simple way of helping a user discover this behaviour—exactly the sort of thing that a transparency resource should do.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/aria-thaker-quartz-india-march-12-2019-twitter-unlike-facebook-barely-carries-political-ads-in-india

Proposed Intermediary Liability Rules threat to privacy and free speech, global coalition tells MeitY

Zaheer Merchant — 2019-03-20T15:56:51Z

“We respectfully call on you to withdraw the draft amendments proposed to the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines) Rules in December. As published, the draft amendments would erode digital security and undermine the exercise of human rights globally.”

The blog post by Zaheer Merchant was published by Medianama on March 18, 2019.

A global coalition of 31 civil society organizations and technology experts has called on MeitY to reconsider the proposed amendments to the Intermediary Liability Rules, terming them a threat to privacy and free speech. In a letter to the ministry dated March 15, the coalition said that the proposed amendments “would harm fundamental rights and the space for a free internet, without necessarily addressing the problems that the ministry aims to resolve.” Some of the signatories are Centre for Internet and Society, SFLC.in, Internet Freedom Foundation, Government Accountability Project and Human Rights Watch, among others (A copy of the letter is attached at the bottom). The letter breaks down its reasons for opposing the proposed amendments:

1. Traceability would undermine security, lead to surveillance

Under the proposed guidelines, intermediaries would have to ensure ‘traceability’ of messages by providing information related to its originator and receivers. This, the letter argues, would force intermediaries to undermine the security of of their platforms and create a surveillance regime. “Undermining security features to ensure traceability would affect all users of that platform, not just those that are the subjects of the information request,” the letter reads. “… such wide and ambiguous powers… on interception of communications would directly harm the fundamental right to privacy of Indians and facilitate unchecked surveillance.”

2. Data retention antithetical to privacy, must go

The letter also states that the data retention mandate included in the draft guidelines is antithetical to privacy. The guidelines state that intermediaries must preserve content requested by law enforcement for 180 days or longer. This open-ended data retention, the letter argues, contradicts the principle of ‘Storage Limitation’ recommended by the Srikrishna Committee. “Provisions regarding storage limitation and data retention must not be included within the fold of the Intermediary Guidelines, and should be subject to parliamentary law-making,” the letter reads.

3. Proactive monitoring contradicts SC’s Shreya Singhal judgment, would result in censorship

The letter also criticizes the requirement that intermediaries proactively monitor and automatically delete ‘unlawful content’. “[This] would directly conflict with the legal standard laid down by the Supreme Court of India in the Shreya Singhal judgment, which holds that intermediaries should only be legally compelled to take down content on the basis of court orders or legally empowered government agencies,” the letter reads. It could also cause intermediaries to err in favor of takedowns, resulting in unnecessary censorship.

“With the upcoming General Elections in India and the imposition of the Model Code of Conduct on new policy decisions in place, we urge the government to not push through these amended regulations given their impact on fundamental rights and secure communications,” the letter concludes.

The proposed amendments to Intermediary Liability Rules

Released at the end of December 2018, the proposed amendments to the Intermediary Guidelines would modify guidelines under the Information Technology Act concerning intermediaries, ostensibly to prevent misuse of social media platforms and check the spread of fake news. Under India’s Information Technology Act, any entity, person or platform that receives, stores, processes, or transmits electronic information on behalf of another is considered an intermediary. These include social media platforms, cloud services, internet service providers, email service providers and more. For an intermediary to avoid liability for its users’ actions, it must comply with the proposed guidelines which are being amended to the following:

Traceability, and information within 72 hours: The new rules require platforms to introduce traceability to find where a piece of information originated. For this, platforms may have to break end-to-end encryption. The rules require the intermediary to hand over information or assistance to government bodies in 72 hours, including in matters of security or cybersecurity, and for investigative purposes. [Rule 3(5)]
Platforms with more than 50 lakh users are required to be registered under the Companies Act, have a physical address in the country, have a nodal officer who will cooperate with law enforcement agencies, etc. [Rule 3(7)]
Platforms have to pull down unlawful content within a shorter duration of 24 hours from the earlier 36 hours. They also have to keep records of the “unlawful activity” for 180 days – double the period of 90 days in the 2011 rules – as required by the court or government agencies [Rule 3(8)]
Platforms have to deploy tools to proactively identify, remove and disable public access to unlawful information or content. [Rule 3(9)]
The new rules insert a monthly requirement on platforms to inform users of the platforms’ right to terminate usage rights and to remove non-compliant information at their own discretion. [Rule 3(4)]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/medianama-march-18-2019-zaheer-merchant-proposed-intermediary-liability-rules-threat-privacy-and-free-speech