We are anonymous, we are legion

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

International Conference on Justice Education:Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence

Admin — 2019-03-20T15:52:29Z

Arindrajit Basu attended the International Conference on Justice Education with the theme "Artificial Intelligence and its Legal Implications" at Institute of Law Nirma University. The event was organized by Nirma University in Ahmedabad on March 15 - 16, 2019. Arindrajit was a theme speaker for the panel on Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence and was a judge of the presentations in the same session.

Click to read the agenda

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/international-conference-on-justice-education-legal-implications-of-artificial-intelligence

Consultation on Draft E-commerce Policy

Admin — 2019-03-20T15:47:02Z

Alternative Law Forum and IT for Change organized a public consultation on draft e-commerce policy on March 14, 2019 at Tony Hall, Ashirwad , Off St.Marks Road in Bangalore. Arindrajit Basu attended the event.

The newly created Department Promotion of Industry and Indian Trade has published a draft e-commerce policy ( [ https://dipp.gov.in/whats-new/draft-national-e-commerce-policy-stakeholder-comments | https://dipp.gov.in/whats-new/draft-national-e-commerce-policy-stakeholder-comments ] ) inviting public comments with a deadline of March end. All actors involved in commerce – from traders, to street vendors, to vendors selling on online platforms, apart from domestic and foreign e-commerce companies are greatly impacted by this new policy. At one level, this policy would determine the relative power among these actors vying for the Indian retail space. At another level, however, the draft policy is about who should own personal, social and commercial data that is behind e-commerce – whether people and communities about whom the data is or it can entirely be owned and appropriated by the e-commerce companies, mostly foreign ones, who collect the data. EU is also examining whether data about and around products put by sellers on online platforms is owned by the these sellers or by platforms. These are issues which need wide and deep discussions by all sections of society from traders , technology enthusiasts, lawyers, civil society and all others. However there is very little public discussions on the same. It is towards this end that we are organising this discussions. We would also like to explore possible inputs that different groups can make to the policy. The Joint Action Committee Against Foreign Retail and E-commerce is one group that has prepared some points on behalf of traders community, which are enclosed, and these too can be discussed at the meeting among others.

The discussion was a first of many more discussions. The participants of this consultation were researchers, lawyers, street vendors union representatives, traders associations representatives and others.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/consultation-on-draft-e-commerce-policy

Wie die chinesische Mega-App TikTok Indiens Wahlkampf beeinflussen könnte

praskrishna — 2019-03-20T15:20:12Z

Die chinesische Kurzvideo-App Tiktok gehört zu den wertvollsten Start-ups der Welt – und sie wird zunehmend politisch. In Indien weckt das Ängste.

The article by Frederic Spohr was published in Handelsblatt on March 13, 2019. Shweta Mohandas was quoted.

Angela Merkel spricht Hindi, zumindest auf der chinesischen Social-Media-App TikTok. In einem Satire-Video steht die Bundeskanzlerin neben dem indischen Premierminister Narendra Modi – und erklärt dem indischen Regierungschef, dass sie ihn gerne heiraten und mit ihm für immer zusammenleben will. Das sagt Merkels indische Synchronstimme. Die App TikTok, mit der Nutzer selbst gedrehte oder bearbeitete Kurzvideos teilen, ist die derzeit wohl erfolgreichste App der Welt. Das dahinter stehende Start-up Bytedance wird mit umgerechnet 66 Milliarden Euro so hoch bewertet ist wie kein anderes junges Unternehmen. Indien ist dabei der mittlerweile wichtigste Auslandsmarkt für die Chinesen. Mehr als 250 Millionen Inder haben die App bereits heruntergeladen. Monatlich kommen Dutzende weitere Millionen dazu.

Doch der Erfolg der chinesischen App hat auch Ängste geweckt. Ab dem 11. April wird auf dem Subkontinent ein neues Parlament gewählt – und wie in vielen anderen Ländern wächst in Indien die Sorge, dass über Social-Media-Plattformen Wahlen manipuliert werden, zum Beispiel weil darüber Falschnachrichten verbreitet, geheime Wählerprofile angelegt oder die Plattformen für Spionage genutzt werden könnten. Das gilt nun nicht mehr nur für Facebook oder Twitter, sondern auch für TikTok – und wegen seiner chinesischen Herkunft vielleicht insbesondere dafür.

Dass TikTok aus China kommt, ist problematisch, weil es bezüglich Datensammlung und -verarbeitung weniger transparent als andere Social-Media-Apps ist“, sagt Shweta Mohandas, Politik-Beauftragte beim Centre for Internet and Society (Cis) in Bangalore.

Der Subkontinent wird so zu einem Testfall für die wachsende politische Bedeutung chinesischer Social-Media-Apps im Ausland. TikTok ist auch in Amerika und Europa bereits weit verbreitet – und hat bereits Kritiker alarmiert. „Die Reichweite dieser Apps zu ignorieren, wäre ein fataler Fehler“, warnt Claudia Biancotti, leitender Ökonom am amerikanischen Thinktank Peterson Institute for International Economics in einem Blogbeitrag über TikTok.

Für Biancotti ist der Umgang mit chinesischen Social-Media-Apps von ähnlich großer Bedeutung wie der Umgang mit dem chinesischen Mobilfunkausrüster Huawei. „Die Tiefe der gesammelten Nutzerdaten machen sie zu sehr wirksamen Instrumenten sowohl für die Spionage als auch für die Manipulation der öffentlichen Meinung.“ Fünf der zehn beliebtesten Apps im indischen Android-Appstore kamen 2018 bereits aus China.

Anzahl politischer Videos nimmt zu

TikTok wirkt vollkommen unpolitisch. Wie in Deutschland überwiegen auch in Indien kurzweilige Witzvideos und private Videoclips. Die meisten Inhalte auf der App sind Musikvideos von Jugendlichen, die mit Effekten aufgehübscht werden. Auch das Merkel-Video ist kein Manipulationsversuch und dürfte für die meisten als klare Satire erkennbar sein.

Doch die Anzahl politischer Videos auf TikTok hat in Indien vor den Wahlen stark zugenommen: Viele junge Menschen erklären beispielsweise, warum sie welchen Politiker wählen werden. Videos mit dem Hashtag NarendraModi wurden fast 30 Millionen mal angesehen, Clips zu seinem Herausforderer Rahul Gandhi wurden rund 12 Millionen Mal angeguckt.

Viele junge Menschen verwenden TikTok und soziale Medien, um mit der Welt zu kommunizieren. Die politischen Parteien haben das erkannt und versuchen, auf die Erstwähler Eindruck zu machen“, sagt Cis-Expertin Mohandas.

Besonders beliebt ist die App auf dem Land. In der Provinz leben die meisten Inder, gleichzeitig ist hier der Bildungsstandard besonders gering. Diese Zielgruppe dürfte am einfachsten zu manipulieren sein.

Subtile Beeinflussung möglich

Eine Beeinflussung könnte theoretisch so subtil verlaufen, dass sie kaum zu überprüfen ist. Möglich wäre beispielsweise ein Szenario, bei dem auf Druck der chinesischen Regierung die Algorithmen so geändert werden, dass Nutzer bestimmte Inhalte verstärkt gezeigt bekommen – oder dass unliebsame Inhalte überhaupt nicht angezeigt werden. In China selbst filtert die heimische App WeChat bereits kritische Inhalte heraus, ohne Sender oder Empfänger zu benachrichtigen.

Wie in Deutschland wurde in Indien bisher bezüglich TikTok vor allem über den Schutz der Privatsphäre von Kindern gesprochen. Die Jugendlichen präsentieren sich in den Videos oft in freizügigen Posen, die Pädophile anlocken könnten. Die generelle Datenschutzproblematik aufgrund des chinesischen Ursprungs des Unternehmens und die mögliche Verbreitung von Falschnachrichten gerät nun aber immer stärker in den Fokus.

Das indische IT-Ministerium kündigte bereits im Februar eine stärkere Regulierung der Social-Media-Apps an. Einflussreiche Hindu-Nationalisten haben sich sogar für ein Verbot der chinesischen Apps ausgesprochen. Die Angriffe dürften dabei auch wirtschaftliche Hintergründe haben: Angesichts der chinesischen und amerikanischen Dominanz geraten indische Konkurrenzangebote immer stärker ins Hintertreffen.

TikTok selbst wehrt sich vehement gegen die Vorwürfe. Es verweist darauf, sich an alle aktuellen Gesetze zu halten und die Inhalte auf der Plattform in zahlreichen Landessprachen zu überwachen. „Die Privatsphäre und Sicherheit unserer Benutzer hat für TikTok höchste Priorität, und wir halten uns an die lokalen Gesetze und Vorschriften in den Märkten, in denen wir tätig sind“, teilt das Unternehmen dem Handelsblatt mit. „TikTok-Benutzerdaten werden in den USA und anderen Märkten, in denen TikTok über branchenführende Rechenzentren von Drittanbietern tätig ist, gespeichert und verarbeitet.“

Rückendeckung bekommt das Unternehmen von der chinesischen Regierung. In einem Artikel der englischsprachigen Parteizeitung „Global Times“ heißt es, TikTok werde von Amerika wie Huawei als Sicherheitsrisiko dargestellt, um Chinas technologischen Aufstieg zu verhindern. TikTok sei nur eine „Unterhaltungs-App für Menschen auf der ganzen Welt, die Spaß und Entspannung wollen“.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/handelsblatt-frederic-spohr-march-13-2019-wahlkampf-beeinflussung-wie-die-chinesische-mega-app-tiktok-indiens-wahlkampf-beeinflussen-koennte

Artificial Intelligence for India's Transformation

Admin — 2019-03-20T01:38:48Z

ASSOCHAM's 3rd International Conference was organized at Hotel Imperial in New Delhi. Amber Sinha a session on use, impact and ethics in AI.

Click to view the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/artificial-intelligence-for-indias-transformation

More urban Indian women are acting against offensive calls and text messages

Aria Thaker — 2019-03-10T02:24:46Z

More Indian women are fighting back against sexual harassment they face over phone calls and text messages, a survey shows.

The blog post by Aria Thaker was published in Quartz India on March 8, 2019. Ambika Tandon was quoted.

In an India-based survey by the Swedish phone-identification app Truecaller, nearly 40% of respondents who had faced sexual harassment via calls and SMSes said they’d filed police complaints against it in 2019—a sharp increase from 10% when the company conducted the same survey just one year ago.

Truecaller’s survey, conducted with global market research firm Ipsos, asked detailed questions to over 2,100 women from metro areas across India. All respondents had to be users of the Truecaller app.

The survey, published yesterday (March 07), showed the staggering scale of phone-based harassment of women in India. One in three respondents reported receiving “sexual and inappropriate” calls or SMSes. This is the same figure as when Truecaller conducted the survey last year.

Women’s responses to phone harassment took various forms. While 62% of women reported having “taken measures against” harassment in 2018, 74% did this year. Some of the steps women took this year included blocking numbers, calling mobile operators to request “do not disturb” activation, ignoring calls, and changing one’s number.

Blocking numbers, the most popular step women took, also saw a substantial increase in popularity from last year. While 65% of women who experienced harassment reported blocking offending numbers in 2018, 92% did so in 2019.

Women who faced harassment also reported being more willing to “name and shame” perpetrators on social media—with 7% reporting having done so last year, and 16% this year. In a recent, high-profile instance of this, when television journalist Barkha Dutt experienced a torrent of phone-based harassment, she published screenshots from her perpetrators’ messages on Twitter.

Why this increase?

Some say that this increase in willingness among women to take action may be in part due to the influence of the MeToo movement, which took India by storm last year.

“MeToo had a huge impact across India,” said Gayatri Sethi, the business head of WhiteBalance, a Delhi-based creative studio that Truecaller partnered with on an anti-harassment media campaign called #ItsNotOK. Now, Sethi said, “women can step up and can tell the world about these issues, and understand that they should not just ignore (harassment).”

Truecaller believes that the Indian government’s initiatives to tackle harassment may also be partly responsible for the increased reports to police. “There’s been a major shift in the approachability of the police, and there are several helplines for women to call and report,” Lindsey LaMont, Truecaller’s global brand manager, told Quartz. “I think this has made a big difference.” In October, as #MeToo gripped India, the country’s National Commission for Women launched helplines and a dedicated email address to field harassment complaints.

It is important to note, however, that Truecaller’s survey—of which around 97% of respondents come from the highest socioeconomic classification group in India—cannot at all be considered nationally representative. “One of their criteria for targeting respondents is that they need to be using Truecaller, which is in itself a very limited sample set,” said Ambika Tandon, a policy officer who researches gender and tech issues for the think tank Centre for Internet and Society.

Indian women of lower socioeconomic strata, Tandon suggested, would be more likely to respond to harassment “by going offline or not accessing mobile phones at all, because they don’t have the kinds of support structures that would exist for communities where there is a larger level of access or skill.”

Tandon also cautioned against the survey’s clubbing together of different ways that women are taking action against harassment, for example, by including steps like ignoring calls or blocking numbers next to filing police complaints. This conflation, she said, could risk being seen as similar to instances of law enforcement bias, in which police sometimes tell women to simply block harassers’ numbers—while “not dealing with (the complaint) as rigorously as they would with a physical harassment complaint.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/more-urban-indian-women-are-acting-against-offensive-calls-and-text-messages

Why entrepreneurs are wary of the new draft e-commerce policy

Rahul Sachitanandan — 2019-03-08T00:32:43Z

Raka Chakrawarti, an entrepreneur from Mumbai, is tensed these days, not about her business, which is booming, but over the rules of the Draft National e-Commerce Policy.

The article by Rahul Sachitanand was published in Economic Times on March 3, 2019. Elonnai Hickok was quoted.

If the policy, drafted by the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (DPIIT) and seeking stakeholder comments, gets a go-ahead as it is, Gourmetdelight, her bootstrapped online vendor of organic goods, will have to certify and add reviews of all the products her marketplace sells.

She says her platform has nearly 1,500 stock keeping units - from black garlic to trikaya baby spinach - and certifying all of these would mean a further strain on her budget and small workforce. Then there are other questions she is seeking answers to: what to do with the growing volume of user data (the policy suggests the government has overarching rights over it); what is the scope of the policy; what is the definition of ecommerce and will the policy, by appearing protectionist, keep away foreign capital, so far the life blood of the sector?

In five years, according to Venture Intelligence, investors have poured over $18 billion across 667 deals in India's ecommerce market. This money, mostly from overseas, has allowed ecommerce startups to grow fast and also offer investors a handsome exit - like in the case of Walmart buying Flipkart.

Some of this momentum may be lost, fear entrepreneurs, since the policy appears to take a protectionist approach - by empowering domestic entrepreneurs, pushing Make in India and proposing to own user data and deterring global investors from betting on the potential of India's ecommerce market.

Legal experts and executives in ecommerce companies feel the draft policy is half-baked. While it makes some progress on protecting home-grown small businesses, the proposals about data ownership and stricter quality norms may make it hard for such businesses to grow.

Ambareesh Murthy, CEO of furniture retailer Pepperfry, says this is a draft that is evolving and the intent may change over time. He is wary of the proposal to give government ownership of, and therefore control over, user data. While the government argues that data is a national resource, executives feel individuals should hold ultimate control over their personal information.

While foreign company-owned Amazon and Flipkart have built their business here, newer entrants such as Chinese upstarts will find an India foray costlier, since the policy calls for setting up of an office here to legally operate. Critics also argue that while the policy starts with the right intentions, it loses focus on the way. They say the recommendations made across more than 14,000 words are too broad, encompassing more than the e-commerce industry itself.

Putting together such an all-encompassing statement isn't right, say policy experts, since it involves not just DPIIT but also other government bodies and regulators, including the Competition Commission of India.

Elonnai Hickok of Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank, says regulators do not fully appreciate the nuances of the growing mountain of data and properly safeguarding it within the country.

"The draft policy has not comprehensively addressed what is the appropriate framework for ensuring data as a national resource," she says. "It appears to take a one-size-fits-all approach - bringing in privacy, intermediary liability, piracy, authenticity of information, etc. without considering potential exceptions and implications of such measures, including rights of individuals." Anirudh Rastogi, founder of Ikigai Law, a firm tackling tech legislation, contends that too much onus has been placed on entrepreneurs and their ventures to meet regulatory norms. "The draft proposes a host of consumer protection and anticounterfeiting measures, which is a good thing on principle," he says. "But this also means a lot of requirements for platforms and other intermediaries which dilute their intermediary status."

Not everyone agrees. For some homegrown entrepreneurs, measures that look protectionist offer a level playing field to compete with well-funded foreign company-owned behemoths.

"The govt is trying to level the playing field and take away some of the power held by well-funded giants over the Indian market," says Ashish Gurnani, cofounder of Postfold, an online bespoke apparel brand. "We can now hope to compete more on variety, curation and quality, rather than discounts alone." When contacted, a DPIIT official involved in the process of drafting the policy, said: "At present, we don't have control over our data. Companies which control our data can say no to sharing it if we want that data. Servers are outside. We're incapacitated as there is no physical or legal control. We want to create jobs through the policy."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-rahul-sachitanand-march-3-2019-why-entrepreneurs-are-wary-of-new-draft-e-commerce-policy

RFCs We Love: Transport & Apps Edition

Admin — 2019-03-08T00:17:57Z

The 2nd meetup of RFCs we love in 2019 was held at Go-Jek in Domlur on 2nd March 2019 in partnership with Bangalore Mobile performance group. Gurshabad Grover was a speaker at this event organized by India Internet Engineering Society.

Gurshabad Grover spoke about ongoing work in the Transport Layer Security (tls) working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on Server Name Indication (SNI) encryption in TLS. For more info click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/rfcs-we-love-transport-apps-edition

Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond”

Admin — 2019-03-07T14:52:09Z

Sunil Abraham will be a speaker at this event organized by TRAI on March 15 at Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennai. Sunil will be speaking on How should Internet Giants- Social Media, Search engines and ad tech be Regulated.

Click to view the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/seminar-on-201cevolution-of-communication-social-media-beyond201d

Nullcon Security Conference

Admin — 2019-03-07T14:40:11Z

On March 1 and 2, 2019, Karan Saini attended the Nullcon Security Conference organized by Nullcon at Holiday Inn Resort, Mobor Beach, Cavelossim, Salcette, Goa.

The schedule of the event can be accessed here. Videos of the talks can be accessed here. The event was:attended by:

Security Practitioners (Analysts, Testers, Developers, Cryptographers, Hackers)
Security Executives (CISOs, CXOs)
Business Developers and Venture Capitalists (Presidents, Directors, VPs, Consultants)
Vendor Companies and Sponsors (Hardware, Software, Services)
Career Seekers and Recruiters (Seasoned Veterans, Students, Expanding Companies
Academia (Professors, Students)

The nullcon conference is a unique platform for security companies/evangelists to showcase their research and technology. Nullcon hosts Prototype, Exhibition, Trainings, Free Workshops, null Job Fair at the conference. It is an integrated and structured platform which caters to the needs of IT Security industry at large in a comprehensive way.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/nullcon-security-conference

'Website not found' pop-ups leave net activists fuming

Tushar Kaushik — 2019-04-03T15:53:04Z

Internet activists are concerned over what they term as rising instances of websites being blocked by internet service providers (ISPs) and the government without citing any reason for doing so.

The article by Tushar Kaushik was published in the Economic Times on March 6, 2019. Gurshabad Grover was quoted.

Last year, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) blocked 2,799 URLs for allegedly hosting malicious content, marking a sharp increase from 2017, when 1,385 URLs were blocked.

These numbers were disclosed by minister of state for electronics and IT SS Ahluwalia in a written reply to a question in the Lok Sabha in February.

In 2016, the number of URLs that were blocked stood at 633.

The government has also withheld information on the list of blocked websites despite several queries under the right to information (RTI) Act, internet activists told ET.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a Bengaluru-based advocacy group, is compiling a list of URLs and websites that are being blocked, and has identified over 3,200 so far. Senior policy officer at CIS Gurshabad Grover said that among the blocked URLs are proxy servers and websites of NGOs that are deemed to have criticised government policy.

As per Grover, some of the websites and URLs reported to have been blocked at some point include the sites of human rights groups such as arabhra-.org, www.protectioninternational.org and www.drugsense.org.Also blocked were a site on feminism (feminist.org), the website of an environmental organisation (wedo.org) and a blog by activist Irom Sharmila (iromsharmilachanu.wordpress.com).

“Many blockades, when brought to the notice of courts, were revoked, but the URLs still remain inaccessible. The bigger problem is that of getting the list of blocked URLs,” Grover told ET.

'Restricting the Right to Receive Information'

A MeitY official, however, said no website is blocked arbitrarily. “No government machinery can order (blocking of a URL) without valid reason and without following valid procedure. And the only procedure available to us is (Section) 69A and 79 (of the IT Act). Rest is a court order,” the senior MeitY official, who did not want to be identified, told ET.

“Valid procedure is (Section) 69A, where we can order. But in addition there is (Section) 79, where notice is issued for any illegal activity happening on any platform. This notice can be issued by the appropriate government department. And the intermediary platform is free to agree to it or disagree,” the official said, adding that every complaint received against a website is considered individually.

Section 69A of the IT Act empowers the Centre to block websites in the interest of national security. Section 79 empowers the government to issue a notice to an intermediary to remove any content that it finds illegal.

A MeitY spokesperson could not respond immediately to ET’s emailed queries on the issue.

Grover of CIS said there was no way to determine if a website was blocked by the government or an ISP, unless a government order for the blocking was available.
For instance, last month, several users of the messenger service Telegram and music sharing website SoundCloud had reported that these websites had been blocked by Reliance Jio, according to the Internet Freedom Foundation.

Reliance Jio did not respond to queries from ET.

Internet Freedom Foundation’s executive director Apar Gupta expressed concern over the lack of information regarding reasons for blocking URLs.

“This is very worrying because it’s a secretive process that prevents the public from accessing a website, which restricts the right to receive information — a part of the fundamental right to freedom of speech and information,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-march-6-2019-tushar-kaushik-website-not-found-pop-ups-leave-net-activists-fuming