We are anonymous, we are legion

The Mother and Child Tracking System - understanding data trail in the Indian healthcare systems

ambika — 2019-12-30T17:18:05Z

This article was first published by Privacy International, on October 17, 2019

Case study of MCTS: Read

On October 17th 2019, the UN Special Rapporteur (UNSR) on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, released his thematic report on digital technology, social protection and human rights. Understanding the impact of technology on the provision of social protection – and, by extent, its impact on people in vulnerable situations – has been part of the work the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Privacy International (PI) have been doing.

Earlier this year, PI responded to the UNSR's consultation on this topic. We highlighted what we perceived as some of the most pressing issues we had observed around the world when it comes to the use of technology for the delivery of social protection and its impact on the right to privacy and dignity of benefit claimants.

Among them, automation and the increasing reliance on AI is a topic of particular concern - countries including Australia, India, the UK and the US have already started to adopt these technologies in digital welfare programmes. This adoption raises significant concerns about a quickly approaching future, in which computers decide whether or not we get access to the services that allow us to survive. There's an even more pressing problem. More than a few stories have emerged revealing the extent of the bias in many AI systems, biases that create serious issues for people in vulnerable situations, who are already exposed to discrimination, and made worse by increasing reliance on automation.

Beyond the issue of AI, we think it is important to look at welfare and automation with a wider lens. In order for an AI to function it needs to be trained on a dataset, so that it can understand what it is looking for. That requires the collection large quantities of data. That data would then be used to train and AI to recognise what fraudulent use of public benefits would look like. That means we need to think about every data point being collected as one that, in the long run, will likely be used for automation purposes.

These systems incentivise the mass collection of people's data, across a huge range of government services, from welfare to health - where women and gender-diverse people are uniquely impacted. CIS have been looking specifically at reproductive health programmes in India, work which offers a unique insight into the ways in which mass data collection in systems like these can enable abuse.

Reproductive health programmes in India have been digitising extensive data about pregnant women for over a decade, as part of multiple health information systems. These can be seen as precursors to current conceptions of big data systems within health informatics. India’s health programme instituted such an information system in 2009, the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS), which is aimed at collecting data on maternal and child health. The Centre for Internet and Society, India, undertook a case study of the MCTS as an example of public data-driven initiatives in reproductive health. The case study was supported by the Big Data for Development network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The objective of the case study was to focus on the data flows and architecture of the system, and identify areas of concern as newer systems of health informatics are introduced on top of existing ones. The case study is also relevant from the perspective of Sustainable Development Goals, which aim to rectify the tendency of global development initiatives to ignore national HIS and create purpose-specific monitoring systems.

After being launched in 2011, 120 million (12 crore) pregnant women and 111 million (11 crore) children have been registered on the MCTS as of 2018. The central database collects data on each visit of the woman from conception to 42 days postpartum, including details of direct benefit transfer of maternity benefit schemes. While data-driven monitoring is a critical exercise to improve health care provision, publicly available documents on the MCTS reflect the complete absence of robust data protection measures. The risk associated with data leaks are amplified due to the stigma associated with abortion, especially for unmarried women or survivors of rape.

The historical landscape of reproductive healthcare provision and family planning in India has been dominated by a target-based approach. Geared at population control, this approach sought to maximise family planning targets without protecting decisional autonomy and bodily privacy for women. At the policy level, this approach was shifted in favour of a rights-based approach to family planning in 1994. However, targets continue to be set for women’s sterilisation on the ground. Surveillance practices in reproductive healthcare are then used to monitor under-performing regions and meet sterilisation targets for women, this continues to be the primary mode of contraception offered by public family planning initiatives.

More recently, this database - among others collecting data about reproductive health - is adding biometric information through linkage with the Aadhaar infrastructure. This data adds to the sensitive information being collected and stored without adhering to any publicly available data protection practices. Biometric linkage is aimed to fulfill multiple functions - primarily authentication of welfare beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Making Aadhaar details mandatory could directly contribute to the denial of service to legitimate patients and beneficiaries - as has already been seen in some cases.

The added layer of biometric surveillance also has the potential to enable other forms of abuse of privacy for pregnant women. In 2016, the union minister for Women and Child Development under the previous government suggested the use of strict biometric-based monitoring to discourage gender-biased sex selection. Activists critiqued the policy for its paternalistic approach to reduce the rampant practice of gender-biased sex selection, rather than addressing the root causes of gender inequality in the country.

There is an urgent need to rethink the objectives and practices of data collection in public reproductive health provision in India. Rather than continued focus on meeting high-level targets, monitoring systems should enable local usage and protect the decisional autonomy of patients. In addition, the data protection legislation in India - expected to be tabled in the next session in parliament - should place free and informed consent, and informational privacy at the centre of data-driven practices in reproductive health provision.

This is why the systematic mass collection of data in health services is all the more worrying. When the collection of our data becomes a condition for accessing health services, it is not only a threat to our right to health that should not be conditional on data sharing but also it raises questions as to how this data will be used in the age of automation.

This is why understanding what data is collected and how it is collected in the context of health and social protection programmes is so important.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-international-ambika-tandon-october-17-2019-mother-and-child-tracking-system-understanding-data-trail-indian-healthcare

The Mirror in the Enigma: How Germany lost World War II to a Mathematical Theorem

elonnai hickok — 2011-09-22T07:53:25Z

Today we use encryption in pretty much everything — cellphones, Internet, banking, satellites, and spaceships. How far have we come since the days of the Enigma and how does it affect our daily lives? CIS invites you to attend a short lecture by Rohit Gupta on August 12, 2011.

About the Lecture

During World War II, the Germans began communicating their military information using the famous Enigma encryption machine. Subsequently, we see how three Polish mathematicians led by Marian Rejewski broke the code using a fundamental theorem in 'group theory'. It has been suggested by certain generals that this breach directly led to the collapse of the Axis powers.

In his talk Rohit will begin with the simplest ways to secure privacy in communication throughout human history, and build up to the rise of the Enigma.

About Rohit

Rohit Gupta is a mathematician who thinks the universe is a giant hologram generated by a microscopic black hole which behaves like a rapidly blinking disco ball. He's finding ways to prove this beyond doubt.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/mirror-in-the-enigma

The Ministry And The Trace: Subverting End-To-End Encryption

Gurshabad Grover, Tanaya Rajwade and Divyank Katira — 2021-07-12T08:18:18Z

A legal and technical analysis of the 'traceability' rule and its impact on messaging privacy.

The paper was published in the NUJS Law Review Volume 14 Issue 2 (2021).

Abstract

End-to-end encrypted messaging allows individuals to hold confidential conversations free from the interference of states and private corporations. To aid surveillance and prosecution of crimes, the Indian Government has mandated online messaging providers to enable identification of originators of messages that traverse their platforms. This paper establishes how the different ways in which this ‘traceability’ mandate can be implemented (dropping end-to-end encryption, hashing messages, and attaching originator information to messages) come with serious costs to usability, security and privacy. Through a legal and constitutional analysis, we contend that traceability exceeds the scope of delegated legislation under the Information Technology Act, and is at odds with the fundamental right to privacy.

Click here to read the full paper.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-ministry-and-the-trace-subverting-end-to-end-encryption

The law tries to catch up with tech

Admin — 2018-09-06T02:11:08Z

At his testimony before the U.S. Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the upcoming elections in India.

The article by Arnika Thakur was published in Fortune India on May 22, 2018

“2018 is an incredibly important year for elections not just with the U.S. midterms, but around the world. There are important elections in India, in Brazil, in Mexico, in Pakistan, and in Hungary,” he said. “We want to make sure we do everything we can to protect the integrity of those elections.”

But is Zuckerberg’s assurance enough? Can Facebook truly ensure that there is no meddling in India’s general elections; political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica is accused of harvesting Facebook data of millions of people, and targeting them with ads designed to influence the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election?

Instead, shouldn’t India proactively strengthen its data privacy laws?

India’s existing regulation on data protection—the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 in its original form, experts say, did not explicitly protect data. And even subsequent amendments were “retrofitting of the law”, says Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet & Society, a Bengaluru-based research and advocacy firm.

One amendment, Section 43-A, makes a “body corporate” possessing, dealing or handling any sensitive personal data or information liable to pay damages if it has been negligent in implementing and maintaining reasonable security practices, and thereby causing “wrongful loss or wrongful gain” to any person. The other amendment, Section 72-A, provides criminal remedy imprisonment of up to three years or a fine of up to Rs 5 lakh or both for disclosure of personal information in breach of lawful contract.

But Abraham says by specifying sensitive personal data, the law excludes breach or misuse of data that aren’t biometrics or the like. “Whenever you produce regulations in this manner those regulations are rarely comprehensive, and, therefore, we are in this situation,” he says. In other words, seemingly innocuous information such as a person’s pop culture interests, political ideology, literary preference, shopping history is not protected.

Under the current law, companies are also not responsible for notifying users if their data are breached. “The entire framework around notification, or how does a user know that their data has actually been affected by a breach; none of these provisions actually exist under Indian law,” says Amlan Mohanty, senior associate, technology and policy, PLR Chambers, a law firm.

Sahir Hidayatullah, CEO of Smokescreen Technologies, a cybersecurity firm, says since Indians are not culturally attuned to the idea of privacy, a comprehensive law is important.

India understands that the existing data protection law is behind the times. Last year, the government constituted a committee of experts chaired by former Supreme Court Justice B.N. Srikrishna to study the matter, make specific suggestions, and suggest a draft Data Protection Bill. In February, speaking on the sidelines of an international conference, India’s electronics and information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said the committee will soon submit its report.

The lawmakers can perhaps take a cue from the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into effect this May. Among other things, GDPR gives individuals greater rights to access data on them, correct inaccuracies, erase personal data in certain cases, and to even transfer their data from one firm to another.

GDPR also clearly defines consent. “The request for consent shall be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable from the other matters, in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language,” it says. The law gives the users the right to withdraw their consent at any time. Currently, most Internet companies seek consent to multiple matters at once, usually when a new user registers for or downloads its service and it is often difficult, if at all, to review it. GDPR will change that in the EU.

Supratim Chakraborty, associate partner at law firm Khaitan & Co, says a clear regulation on consent is requisite in India, where many are first-time Internet users or do not understand English or are even illiterate. “When you obtain consent, it has to be understood in a proper manner by the people, and secondly, the people who are receiving the data are also obligated to protect it in a particular manner. That is something that we should gun for in the new law,” says Chakraborty.

Mohanty of PLR Chambers says GDPR also spells out the principles of applicability with clarity by stating the law will be applicable even on a foreign entity if the breach impacts an EU citizen. “The problem in India is ensuring that foreign companies operating in India are held accountable,” he says. “One of the key issues that India has to deal with is ensuring that the law that India passes is going to be applicable to entities that function outside India.”

Sivarama Krishnan, partner and leader, cybersecurity, at consultancy PwC India, says India also needs to address the issue of who or which body will implement the data protection law. “In the Western world, there is usually a privacy commission or authority, and resources to enforce the regulation. In India, there is lack of enforcement capability in the government to implement the existing regulation,” he says.

There is also the matter of the government’s priority. The union government’s biometric identification programme, Aadhaar, does not have a spotless record on data protection users’ data have on multiple times been breached, or even published online, by third party service providers, hackers, and even by government websites.

But India has seen serious consequences of weak data protection: A judge’s report on the 1993 Bombay riots found that voters’ lists and business registers were used by perpetrators to identify victims and their businesses.

Today, there is a lot more data a criminal can get access to, from a government identification programme to your Facebook profile to your smartphone’s GPS signal. No data breach is innocuous.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/fortune-india-arnika-thakur-may-22-2018-law-tries-to-catch-up-with-tech

The Last Word: Is there a need to review Information Technology Act?

praskrishna — 2012-11-21T12:10:15Z

Does the high-handed arrest of two young girls mean it's time to review and revise the IT Act?

Aryaman Sundaram, Pavan Duggal, Pranesh Prakash and Ravi Visvesvaraya Prasad took part in a discussion with Karan Thapar on section 66A of the IT Act. This was aired on CNN-IBN on November 20, 2012.

Pranesh Prakash said that it was just not a history of misuse of section 66A of the IT Act because that presumes that the law is otherwise fine and it has just been applied wrongly. This law is fundamentally flawed. It is unconstitutional. It is like a law in which there is a provision on rape, murder, theft, nuisance, everything put together in a single section with the same punishment being given for all of them. This obviously is not good law making but that is exactly what has been done in this case by taking bits from laws in the UK and from elsewhere and mashing them all up into one omnibust gargantuan monster which is unconstitutional.

Pranesh Prakash also added that the fact is that if you have bad laws they will be used to harass people. Having good law is one part of that. Apart from that there has been also other laws which have been misapplied in this case. In all these recent cases, section 66A of the IT Act wasn't the only provision used. This particular section has been used in conjunction with some other laws. So section 66A of the IT Act independently is not required. There are other laws in the Indian Penal Code and elsewhere which are usually enough to cover all the things that section 66A of the IT Act is right now covering. It is just an add on provision that really can't justify its existence unless it is really reduced in scope.

Watch the full video that was aired on CNN-IBN

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ibnlive-videos-november-20-2012-the-last-word-is-there-a-need-to-review-information-technology-act

The Last Chance for a Welfare State Doesn’t Rest in the Aadhaar System

sumandro — 2016-04-19T13:18:42Z

Boosting welfare is the message, which is how Aadhaar is being presented in India. The Aadhaar system as a medium, however, is one that enables tracking, surveillance, and data monetisation. This piece by Sumandro Chattapadhyay was published in The Wire on April 19, 2016.

Originally published in and cross-posted from The Wire.

Once upon a time, a king desired that his parrot should be taught all the ancient knowledge of the kingdom. The priests started feeding the pages of the great books to the parrot with much enthusiasm. One day, the king asked the priests if the parrot’s education has completed. The priests poked the belly of the parrot but it made no sound. Only the rustle of undigested pages inside the belly could be heard. The priests declared that the parrot is indeed a learned one now.

The fate of the welfare system in our country is quite similar to this parrot from Tagore’s parable. It has been forcefully fed identification cards and other official documents (often four copies of the same) for years, and always with the same justification of making it more effective and fixing the leaks. These identification regimes are in effect killing off the welfare system. And some may say that that has been the actual plan in any case.

The Aadhaar number has been recently offered as the ‘last chance’ for the ailing welfare system – a last identification regime that it needs to gulp down to survive. This argument wilfully overlooks the acute problems with the Aadhaar project.

Firstly, the ‘last chance’ for a welfare state in India is not provided by implementing a new and improved identification regime (Aadhaar numbers or otherwise), but by enabling citizens to effectively track, monitor, and ensure delivery of welfare, services, and benefits. This ‘opening up’ of the welfare bureaucracy has been most effectively initiated by the Right to Information Act. Instead of a centralised biometrics-linked identity verification platform, which gives the privilege of tracking and monitoring welfare flows only to a few expert groups, an effective welfare state requires the devolution of such privilege and responsibility.

We should harness the tracking capabilities of electronic financial systems to disclose how money belonging to the Consolidated Fund of India travel around state agencies and departmental levels. Instead, the Aadhaar system effectively stacks up a range of entry barriers to accessing welfare – from malfunctioning biometric scanners, to connectivity problems, to the burden of keeping one’s fingerprint digitally legible under all labouring and algorithmic circumstances.

Secondly, authentication of welfare recipients by Aadhaar number neither make the welfare delivery process free of techno-bureaucratic hurdles, nor does it exorcise away corruption. Anumeha Yadav has recently documented the emerging ‘unrest at the ration shop’ across Rajasthan, as authentication processes face technical and connectivity delays, people get ‘locked out’ of public services for not having or having Aadhaar number with incorrect demographic details, and no mechanisms exist to provide rapid and definitive recourse.

RTI activists at the Satark Nagrik Sangathan have highlighted that the Delhi ration shops, using Aadhaar-based authentication, maintain only two columns of data to describe people who have come to the shop – those who received their ration, and those who did not (without any indication of the reason). This leads to erasure-by-design of evidence of the number of welfare-seekers who are excluded from welfare services when the Aadhaar-based authentication process fails (for valid reasons, or otherwise).

Reetika Khera has made it very clear that using Aadhaar Payments Bridge to directly transfer cash to a beneficiary’s account, in the best case scenario, may only take care of one form of corruption: deception (a different person claiming to be the beneficiary). But it does not address the other two common forms of public corruption: collusion (government officials approving undue benefits and creating false beneficiaries) and extortion (forceful rent seeking after the cash has been transferred to the beneficiary’s account). Evidently, going after only deception does not make much sense in an environment where collusion and extortion are commonplace.

Thirdly, the ‘relevant privacy question’ for Aadhaar is not limited to how UIDAI protects the data collected by it, but expands to usage of Aadhaar numbers across the public and private sectors. The privacy problem created by the Aadhaar numbers does begin but surely not end with internal data management procedures and responsibilities of the UIDAI.

On one hand, the Aadhaar Bill 2016 has reduced the personal data sharing restrictions of the NIAI Bill 2010, and has allowed for sharing of all data except core biometrics (fingerprints and iris scan) with all agencies involved in authentication of a person through her/his Aadhaar number. These agencies have been asked to seek consent from the person who is being authenticated, and to inform her/him of the ways in which the provided data (by the person, and by UIDAI) will be used by the agency. In careful wording, the Bill only asks the agencies to inform the person about “alternatives to submission of identity information to the requesting entity” (Section 8.3) but not to provide any such alternatives. This facilitates and legalises a much wider collection of personal demographic data for offering of services by public agencies “or any body corporate or person” (Section 57), which is way beyond the scope of data management practices of UIDAI.

On the other hand, the Aadhaar number is being seeded to all government databases – from lists of HIV patients, of rural citizens being offered 100 days of work, of students getting scholarships meant for specific social groups, of people with a bank account. Now in some sectors, such as banking, inter-agency sharing of data about clients is strictly regulated. But we increasingly have non-financial agencies playing crucial roles in the financial sector – from mobile wallets to peer-to-peer transaction to innovative credit ratings. Seeding of Aadhaar into all government and private databases would allow for easy and direct joining up of these databases by anyone who has access to them, and not at all by security agencies only.

When it becomes publicly acceptable that the money bill route was a ‘remedial’ instrument to put the Rajya Sabha ‘back on track’, one cannot not wonder about what was being remedied by avoiding a public debate about the draft bill before it was presented in Lok Sabha. The answer is simple: welfare is the message, surveillance is the medium.

Acceptance and adoption of all medium requires a message, a content. The users are interested in the message. The message, however, is not the business. Think of Free Basics. Facebook wants people with none or limited access to internet to enjoy parts of the internet at zero data cost. Facebook does not provide the content that the users consume on such internet. The content is created by the users themselves, and also provided by other companies. Facebook own and control the medium, and makes money out of all content, including interactions, passing through it.

The UIDAI has set up a biometric data bank and related infrastructure to offer authentication-as-a-service. As the Bill clarifies, almost all agencies (public or private, national or global) can use this service to verify the identity of Indian residents. Unlike Facebook, the content of these services do not flow through the Aadhaar system. Nonetheless, Aadhaar keeps track of all ‘authentication records’, that is records of whose identity was authenticated by whom, when, and where. This database is gold (data) mine for security agencies in India, and elsewhere. Further, as more agencies use authentication based on Aadhaar numbers, it becomes easier for them to combine and compare databases with other agencies doing the same, by linking each line of transaction across databases using Aadhaar numbers.

Welfare is the message that the Aadhaar system is riding on. The message is only useful for the medium as far as it ensures that the majority of the user population are subscribing to it. Once the users are enrolled, or on-boarded, the medium enables flow of all kinds of messages, and tracking and monetisation (perhaps not so much in the case of UIDAI) of all those flows. It does not matter if the Aadhaar system is being introduced to remedy the broken parliamentary process, or the broken welfare distribution system. What matters is that the UIDAI is establishing the infrastructure for a universal surveillance system in India, and without a formal acknowledgement and legal framework for the same.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-last-chance-for-a-welfare-state-doesnt-rest-in-the-aadhaar-system

The kids are all on Facebook

praskrishna — 2012-07-20T06:24:17Z

In one photo, Prerna stands in front of the mirror, back slightly arched, a fringe covering her left eye, one hand on her hip, pursing her lips. The other hand holds the camera in a steadfast grip. Below this picture are almost a hundred likes and comments. There is nothing unusual as such about this photo on Facebook. Prerna, however, is just 11.

This article by Shikha Kumar was published in Daily News & Analysis on July 8, 2012. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

"Stop looking so pretty" and "OMG! You’re so thin" are some of the comments that appear under the picture of this young girl.

In another picture, Diksha’s wavy hair cascades around her face as she fixes the camera with an unwavering stare. The caption reads — "I love my hair. I know I sound like a conceited bitch." Diksha is 12.

Children like Prerna and Diksha, who are under the age of 13, are officially not allowed to open accounts on Facebook. But they are among the 7.5 million under-13 users of the popular social networking website, according to a study released by Consumer Reports last year. The study further revealed that among such users, 5 million were under the age of 10. Closer home, a McAfee-Synovate survey conducted across various cities in India revealed that 64% kids in the age group of 9-12 are members of social networking sites.

You may find the trend daunting since ‘kids’ are supposed to step out and socialise, rather than chat online. However, it’s a reality that we have no choice but to accept as a modern reality.

Internally, Facebook seems to have accepted the trend. As revealed by a news reports last month, the company is readying a technology that will allow children younger than 13 to open accounts and operate them in a secure manner. Possible approaches include connecting the children’s Facebook accounts with their parents’, and giving parents the control over who befriends their children on the website.

The New ways of being in touch with ‘friends’
The move has once again put the spotlight on the ways in which social networking is changing the way children interact with each other.

Namrata Bhoomkar, 13, logs on to the website at least two to three times a day. "I check my news feeds and see what my friends are up to. If you’re not on Facebook, you can’t be updated with what’s happening with everybody," she says.

Apart from finding out what their friends are up to, kids also spend a lot of time sharing their pictures, and are proficient at photo editing software like Photoshop, Picasa and Photobooth to make their pictures more striking.

Another way of standing out is to give pictures creative captions. "I google random quotes on love and life and then put those up as captions on the pictures. I get a lot of likes for it, which makes me feel nice," says 13-year old Sakshi Shrivastav.

Having No clue about privacy settings
However, while the kids use many of Facebook’s features, few are aware of the risks or the privacy settings available on the website that can protect them. In the McAfee-Synovate survey, 32% of the kids were not aware of any online threats, such as cyber hacking, stalking, bullying and identity thefts.

As a result, lessons are often learnt the hard way. "A 39-year-old man started sending me messages saying that I’m very pretty. My father found out and told me to disable my account. I was very upset since all my friends are on Facebook. So finally, my sister helped me activate my privacy settings," says an underage girl on the condition of anonymity.

Anandita Mishra, a security expert at McAfee Cybermum India, says that she does not advocate kids’ presence on Facebook. "There are several dangers; there might be paedophiles lurking, strangers pretending to be younger or your child may be a victim of online abusing or bullying," she says.

With the new timeline format, even though one’s account is protected, the cover pictures are always visible to everybody. In such cases, Mishra recommends either keeping no cover photo or keeping pictures of favourite cartoon characters.

In the face of so many risks, some experts believe that Facebook’s move to officially allow younger kids under some form of parental supervision is a step in the right direction.

"Children’s interaction online should always be under parental supervision. Censorship and control is not the responsibility of the government, but of parents," points out Sunil Abraham, director, Centre for Internet and Society.

Abraham believes that if this technology comes into force, children will consume content more responsibly. This will also give them the chance to go out in the real world and get some real communication experience, the old-fashioned way.

"They will even behave responsibly. If the account is supervised, they are less likely to engage in bullying, abusing, sexting or any other unacceptable forms of social behaviour," he adds.

While she is not totally in favour of this development, McAfee’s Mishra sees no other way because parents are unable to control their children. "Seven million kids are online with or without parental supervision. You cannot have cyber policing of children. It is important to inculcate the right values about responsible internet usage," she says.

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

The internet’s new billion

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T07:31:19Z

New web users — in countries like Brazil and China — are changing the culture of the internet.

The harried mother had little wish to visit an internet cafe with two squirmy boys in tow, but she said there was no choice.

New to this potholed neighborhood on the city’s northern edge, Fabina da Silva, 31, needed to enroll her sons in school. Registering online was the only way.

“If it wasn’t a necessity, I wouldn’t be here,” da Silva said on a recent afternoon as her 6-year-old, Lucas, thumped his toy Sponge Bob on the mouse pad beside her. “Nowadays, internet in Brazil is a necessity.”

Brazil has long been a bellwether nation for emerging-market internet trends and it’s riding a wave that will soon sweep the globe. The newest billion people to venture online are doing so in developing countries rather than North America or Europe.

And whether those newcomers are getting online for fun or because they must, they’re doing so en masse. For businesses nimble enough to serve markets as diverse as Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia, the shift promises a staggering number of new customers.

But internet trend-watchers say there’s more at stake than the emergence of a worldwide class of digital consumers. The new users are changing the culture of the internet itself. Researchers say the web as it was originally, if idealistically, conceived — a largely free, monolingual space where a shared digital culture prevailed — may soon be a distant memory. And it’s happening remarkably fast.

“Potentially explosive” is how Marcos Aguiar describes the growth. He’s a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group’s Sao Paulo office who co-authored a report released in September called “The Internet’s New Billion.” It concludes the number of web users in developing-world “BRICI” countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and Indonesia — will jump from 610 million this year to 1.2 billion by 2015.

When the internet crossed the billion-user threshold just five years ago, the developed world commanded a 60-40 majority online, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union. Today, that proportion has roughly reversed.

The new users are younger, poorer and more numerous than ever before, BCG’s analysts said, and increasing numbers will need web access and won't be able to afford broadband in their living room.

As Fabina da Silva pecked away on a keyboard to register her sons for school, she was in many ways typical of low-income Brazilian users. Those who don’t have web access at home often pay small fees to use ad hoc cybercafes known here as “LAN houses.” Many began as rooms full of connected computers, or local area networks, for multi-player gaming, but their customer base has since broadened.

In India, those following the trend say a huge portion of the new billion will enter the web via mobile devices.

“If you look at our broadband figures in India, it’s quite pathetic,” said Sunil Abraham, director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank in Bangalore. “And less than 1 percent of the population has ever accessed the internet.”

But recently, many Indian telecommunication firms have begun giving out free data plans with their mobile devices — a move Sunil said will instantly send millions of Indians onto the internet. “The moment an end user acquires a smart phone they become a data user because they’re not paying for it,” he said. “But they’re not coming onto the internet like you and I know.”

Instead, phone companies only provide access to a few sites, such as Wikipedia and Facebook Zero, a stripped-down mobile version of the social networking site that omits photos but allows messaging and status updates. “They’re coming onto a network that, from the beginning, is a complete walled garden,” he said.

The new walls dividing regions of the internet aren’t likely to stop there. Even as more users join the web worldwide, they are increasingly separated by language. What the nearly 400 million users in China experience as the internet is vastly different than the web surfed by Americans. Much of the software and websites on the Chinese web are produced domestically in the local language. That’s also how it works in Russia and Indonesia.

Some observers say this difference has political consequences. “Many of the local companies provide far better service than the likes of Google and Facebook in those markets,” said Evgeny Morozov, a digital technology researcher at Stanford University. “But also those local websites are much easier to censor because the corporate entities behind those sites all have some domestic presence.”

Morozov is author of an up-coming book “The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom,” and he said there’s a dark side to be found in the internet’s new billion, too. Because poorer users resort to more centralized methods for getting online — cybercafes, cell-phone towers — their activity will be much easier to monitor.

“The fact that so much of this is happening in cybercafes and mobile devices actually empowers the government because those two things are much easier to control than a desktop computer in your house,” Morozov said.

Morozov is also skeptical of notions that greater diversity of cultures online will lead to more cultural dialogue. “There is very little interaction between communities and it’s not because the tools are lacking. It’s just that modern-day Indians and modern-day Russians have nothing to talk about most of the time,” he said. “There may simply be no demand for joining that global village.”

More optimistic web scholars argue there will be cultural conversations, but bridging the gaps between communities will take effort. “The internet has become a bunch of interlinked but linguistically distinct and culturally specific spaces,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “There’s some interface between them but there’s a lot less than there was years back when we were sort of pretending that this was one great global space.”

Instead of becoming the world’s biggest tool for cultural exchange, Zuckerman said the web could become its principal medium for mutual misunderstanding. “We’re mostly talking to people like ourselves rather than talking across cultural boundaries,” Zuckerman said. “And when we do cross cultural boundaries, it’s often in a way where we’re overhearing something that really pisses us off.”

Take for example the 2005 scandal after a Danish newspaper posted cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, sparking riots across the Muslim world. Zuckerman said such incidents may become routine. “It’s a problem of unseen audiences,” he said. “We always have to be aware there are other audiences out there listening, and they’re particularly listening for mentions of themselves.”

For a more amusing and recent online snafu, Zuckerman prefers citing a topic that went viral on the micro-blogging site Twitter this summer. The topic, the Brazilian Portuguese phrase “Cala boca, Galvao,” was mysterious to many English-speaking users. Asked to explain, a few mischievous Brazilians claimed the Galvao was a rare Amazon bird being slaughtered to extinction for its colorful feathers. For everyone who re-tweeted the phrase, so the pranksters claimed, 10 cents would be donated to a global effort to save the bird.

The encouragement helped catapult the phrase into the ranks of Twitter’s top-trending topics, or most-repeated phrases worldwide last June. But in reality, Galvao was the first name of Galvao Bueno, a Brazilian sports commentator on the Globo network, whose pronouncements during the World Cup had irritated many of his compatriots. In Brazilian Portuguese, “Cala boca” roughly means, “shut up.”

“There’s an entirely different conversation going on that’s so incomprehensible to Americans that the Brazilians make fun of us when we try to understand,” Zuckerman said. “In many ways that sort of characterizes for me what’s going on with the contemporary ‘net.'”

But Zuckerman still believes virtual borders can be crossed. In 2005, he co-founded Global Voices, an aggregator and translator of blogs from around the world, in part to help the next billion web users communicate.

“These billion users are sort of proxy for the global middle class,” he said. “They’re an increasing economic force, an increasing cultural force, and they are the people we need to negotiate with and have a conversation with if we want to address problems like climate change.”

In the run-down Engenho da Rainha neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, some of the LAN house customers seemed more interested in using the web to play games than solve the world’s problems.

One wiry teen in a blue baseball cap barely glanced away from his screen to answer questions. “I’ll spend all day, all night on the internet if I’m allowed,” said Carlos Wallace Cruz, 16. “I’d say I’m 98 percent addicted.”

Cruz’s drug of choice isn’t likely to ring a bell with Americans his age. It’s a video game available only on Orkut, a Google social networking site, wildly popular in Brazil and India but less so in the United States.

When a visitor asked if he ever spent time on Orkut’s much more famous rival site, Cruz responded with earnest puzzlement.

“What’s Facebook?” he asked.

Read the original in the Global Post

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-new-billion

The Internet, Culture, and Society - Looking at Past, Present, and Future Worldwide

praskrishna — 2011-10-21T10:13:23Z

It is now well known that with 4.5 billion mobile phone owners in the world and increased Internet penetration, global cultures and communities have experienced shifts in their economic, political, and social well-being due to the digital revolution. As a scholar and consultant who works worldwide, Prof Ramesh Srinivasan will illustrate how new media technologies have been used creatively to enable political movements in Kyrgyzstan, literacy and educational reform in India, and economic development across the developing world. In addition to this, he will discuss some of digital culture's biggest challenges, including considering how the Web can start to empower different types of cultural perspectives and knowledges. The talk will be live streamed.

Prof. Ramesh Srinivasan

Ramesh Srinivasan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Studies and Design|Media Arts at the University of California Los Angeles. He is a hybrid of an engineer, designer, social scientist, and ethnographer. His research and consultancy work focuses on the interaction between new media technologies and global cultures and communities. This involves studying the ways in which information technology shapes global education, health, economics, politics, governance, and social movements. He works in such diverse parts of the world as Kyrgyzstan, India, Native America, and more. Ramesh earned a doctorate in design from Harvard University, a Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Laboratory and a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University.

For more information on Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan

video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/Internet-Culture-Society

The Internet Will Be Everywhere In 2025, For Better Or Worse

praskrishna — 2014-04-04T09:08:38Z

In 2025, the Internet will enhance our awareness of the world and ourselves while diminishing privacy and allowing abusers to "make life miserable for others," according to a new report by the Pew Research Center and Elon University.

The blog post was originally published on the website of WCAI Cape and Islands NPR on March 12, 2014. Dr. Nishant Shah is quoted.

But more than anything, experts say, it will become ubiquitous and embedded in our lives — the same way electricity is today.

"The Internet will shift from the place we find cat videos to a background capability that will be a seamless part of how we live our everyday lives," says Joe Touch, director of the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute. "We won't think about 'going online' or 'looking on the Internet' for something. We'll just be online, and just look."

The report follows a survey last month on how the Internet has affected our lives in the 25 years since Sir Tim Berners-Lee released a paper proposing the World Wide Web. By 1989, the Internet had already been around for nearly two decades, but it wasn't widely accessible. Berners-Lee's ideas became the foundation of the way we access the Internet today.

So the Pew report asked: What do you expect to be the most significant overall impacts of our uses of the Internet on humanity between now and 2025? Here are some of the 1,800 respondents' predictions:

Survey Highlights

The Internet will allow us to collect information on every aspect of our lives and become more aware of our behavior — at the peril of privacy.

"We'll have a picture of how someone has spent their time, the depth of their commitment to their hobbies, causes, friends, and family. This will change how we think about people, how we establish trust, how we negotiate change, failure, and success," says Judith Donath, a fellow at Harvard University. Other experts predict that this can also effectively personalize health care and disease prevention.

But the conveniences come with tradeoffs. Llewellyn Kriel, head of a media services company in South Africa, has a far less rosy view. "Everything will be available online with price tags attached. Cyberterrorism will become commonplace. Privacy and confidentiality of any and all personal will become a thing of the past," he says.

Some predict that privacy in 2025 will be a luxury reserved for the upper class.

The Internet's pervasiveness will spread both education and ignorance

"The smartest person in the world currently could well be stuck behind a plow in India or China," says Hal Varian, chief economist for Google. "Enabling that person — and the millions like him or her — will have a profound impact on the development of the human race."

The downside? Group-think, mob mentality and manipulation. "The Internet will be used as the most effective force of mind control the planet has ever seen, leaving the Madison Avenue revolution as a piddling, small thing by comparison," says Mikey O'Connor, an elected representative to ICANN's GNSO Council, representing the ISP and Connectivity Provider Constituency.

We can't fully understand its effects yet

"The greatest impact of the Internet is what we are already witnessing, but it is going to accelerate," says Nishant Shah, director of research at the Centre for Internet and Society in India.

It might not even do as much as we think, as Dell engineer Anoop Ghanwani predicts: "Regulation will always stand in the way of anything significant happening."

Jeff Jarvis, entrepreneurial journalism professor at the City University of New York, compares the Internet to the printing press: Its significance could not have been predicted. "The impact of the book on society was not fully realized until 100 years after the invention of the press. ... In the development of the Net and its impact on society, we are at 1472 in Gutenberg years," Jarvis says. "Consider the change brought by the Web its first 20 years, and now you ask us to predict the next dozen? Sorry."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/cape-and-islands-march-12-2014-the-internet-will-be-everywhere-in-2025-for-better-or-worse

The Internet Way

nishant — 2014-02-14T06:59:48Z

Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London was published in Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014.

Click to download the file (PDF, 2436 Kb). Dr. Nishant Shah's review can be found on page 16.

The Age of Amazon’ is not just the title of a book, it is a retrospective on the history of e-commerce as well as a prophecy for the shape of things to come. In his meticulously reported book, Brad Stone takes us through the roller coaster ride of the ‘Everything Store’ that Amazon has become, building a gripping tale of an idea that has become synonymous to the world of online shopping in just over two decades.

The book reads well as a biopic on the visionary lunacy of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as a gripping tale of how ideas grow and develop in the digital information age. Stone is an expert storyteller, not only because of his eye for the whimsical, the curious and the enchantment of the seemingly banal, but also because of his ability to question his own craft.

At the very outset, Stone warns us that the book has been compiled through workers at employee, but not Bezos himself. This helps Stone separate the maker from the brand — unlike Steve Jobs who became the cult icon for Apple, Bezos himself has never become the poster child of his brand, allowing

Amazon to become not only an everything store but everybody store. But it means that Stone’s task was to weave together the personal biography of Bezos, his dramatic journey through life with the tumultuous and adventurous inception and growth of Amazon, and his skill lies in the meeting of the twines, which he does with style, ease and charm.

One of the easiest accusations to throw at a book like this is to state that it reduces the murky, blurred, messy and incoherent set of events into a narrative that establishes causes and attributes design and intention where none existed. However, Stone was confronted with the idea of ‘Narrative Fallacy’ — a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Black Swan, referring to the tendency of human beings to reduce complex phenomenon to “soothing but oversimplified stories”. In fact, the challenge to not reduce the book to a series of connected anecdotes was posed by Bezos when Stone pitched the book to him. And what has emerged is a book about accidents, serendipity, risk, redundancy, failure charting the ineffable, inscrutable and inexplicable ways in which digital technologies are shaping the worlds we live in.

With the rigour and journalistic inquiry that Stone has displayed in his regular writings in The Businessweek, The Everything Store has stories which are as memorable as they are unexpected. Stone does a fantastic job of charting Bezos’ life — from tracking down the lost father who had no idea what his son, who he had abandoned at age three, has become, to the chuckleworthy compilation of Bezos’ favourite quotes (Stone calls it his ‘greatest hits’), the book is filled with pointed and poignant observations and stories that give us an idea of the extraordinary life of Jeff Bezos. But unlike the expected character creation of a mad genius, what you get is the image of a man who lived in contradictions: wedded to his internal idea of truth but also ruthless in his business policies which were predatory and competitive to say the least; a businessman who once wrote a memo titled ‘Amazon.love’ about how he wanted a company to be “loved not feared” but also used the metaphor of a “cheetah preying on the gazelles” in its acquisition of smaller businesses; a man who thought of himself as a “missionary rather than a mercenary” and yet built a business empire that embodies some of the most discriminatory, exploitative and stark conditions of adjunct, adhoc, underpaid and contract-based labour of our precariously mobile worlds.

Stone is masterful as he segues from Bezos’ personal life and ambitions into the monomaniacal and turbulent trajectory of Amazon. Amazon is not a simple success story. It tried and failed at many things, but what remains important is how, it failed at the traditional way of doing things and succeeded at the internet way of thinking. So when Amazon failed, it was not a failure to succeed, but a failure that resulted because the infrastructure needed to make it succeed was not yet in place. Stone’s narrative that effortlessly takes us through the economics, trade, policies, regulation, administration and struggles of Amazon, shows how it was a company that had to invent the world it wanted to succeed in, in order to succeed. In many ways, the book becomes not only about Amazon and its ambitions to sell everything from A-Z, but about how it built prototypes for the rest of the world so that it could become relevant and rule.

But the book is not a Martin-Scorsese-type homage to the scoundrel or the villain. While it is imbued up and spit you out. And if you are good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.” Or as Stone himself suggests, that is the way the company is going to grow “until either Jeff Bezos exits the scene or no one is left to stand in his way”. This policy of taking everything from its employees and channelling it to the relentless growth of the company accounts for not only the high attrition rate of top executives but also the growing controversies about work and labour conditions in Amazon warehouses and on-the-ground delivery services.

Stone’s book does not go into great detail about the new work force that companies like Amazon produce — a work force that is reduced to being a cog in a system, performing mechanical tasks, working at minimal wage, and without the protections that are offered to the white collar high-level technology executives that are the popup children of the digital trade. Stone reminds us that behind the incredible platform that Amazon is, is a massive physical infrastructure which almost reminds us of the early industrial days where the labourer was in a state of exploitation and precariousness. And even as we celebrate the rise of these global behemoths, we might forget that behind the seductive interfaces and big data applications, that under the excitement of drone-based delivery systems and artificial intelligence that will start delivering things even before you place the order, is a system that pushes more and more workers in unprotected and exploitative work conditions.

All in all, The Everything Store is a little bit like Amazon itself. It is a love story of a man with his ideas, and how the rest of the world has shifted, tectonically, to accommodate these eruptions. In its historical retrospective, it shows us the full scope of the ideas and possibilities that inform Amazon, and thus the future that it is going to build for us. And with masterful craftsmanship, Brad Stone writes that it is as much about the one man and his company, as it is about the physical and affective infrastructure of our rapidly transforming digital worlds.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/biblio-january-february-volume-ix-8-nishant-shah-the-internet-way

The Internet Has a New Standard for Censorship

jyoti — 2016-01-30T09:17:54Z

The introduction of the new 451 HTTP Error Status Code for blocked websites is a big step forward in cataloguing online censorship, especially in a country like India where access to information is routinely restricted.

The article was published in the Wire on January 29, 2016. The original can be read here.

Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 opens with the declaration, “It was a pleasure to burn.” The six unassuming words offer a glimpse into the mindset of the novel’s protagonist, ‘the fireman’ Guy Montag, who burns books. Montag occupies a world of totalitarian state control over the media where learning is suppressed and censorship prevails. The title alludes to the ‘temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns,’ an apt reference to the act of violence committed against citizens through the systematic destruction of literature. It is tempting to think about the novel solely as a story of censorship. It certainly is. But it is also a story about the value of intellectual freedom and the importance of information.

Published in 1953, Bradbury’s story predates home computers, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook, and yet it anticipates the evolution of these technologies as tools for censorship. When the state seeks to censor speech, they use the most effective and easiest mechanisms available. In Bradbury’s dystopian world, burning books did the trick; in today’s world, governments achieve this by blocking access to information online. The majority of the world’s Internet users encounter censorship even if the contours of control vary depending on the country’s policies and infrastructure.

Online censorship in India

In India, information access blockades have become commonplace and are increasingly enforced across the country for maintaining political stability, for economic reasons, in defence of national security or preserving social values. Last week, the Maharashtra Anti-terror Squad blocked 94 websites that were allegedly radicalising the youth to join the militant group ISIS. Memorably, in 2015 the NDA government’s ham-fisted attempts at enforcing a ban on online pornography resulted in widespread public outrage. Instead of revoking the ban, the government issued yet another vaguely worded and in many senses astonishing order. As reported by Medianama, the revised order delegates the responsibility of determining whether banned websites should remain unavailable to private intermediaries.

The state’s shifting reasons for blocking access to information is reflective of its tendentious attitude towards speech and expression. Free speech in India is messily contested and normally, the role of the judiciary acts as a check on the executive’s proclivity for banning. For instance, in 2010 the Supreme Court upheld the Maharashtra High Court’s decision to revoke the ban on the book on Shivaji by American author James Laine, which, according to the state government, contained material promoting social enmity. However, in the context of communications technology the traditional role of courts is increasingly being passed on to private intermediaries.

The delegation of authority is evident in the government notifying intermediaries to proactively filter content for ‘child pornography’ in the revised order issued to deal with websites blocked as result of its crackdown on pornography. Such screening and filtering requires intermediaries to make a determination on the legality of content in order to avoid direct liability. As international best practices such as the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability point out, such screening is a slow process and costly and intermediaries are incentivised to simply limit access to information.

Blocking procedures and secrecy

The constitutional validity of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2008 which grants power to the executive to block access to information unchecked, and in secrecy was challenged in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Curiously, the Supreme Court upheld S69A reasoning that the provisions were narrowly-drawn with adequate safeguards and noted that any procedural inconsistencies may be challenged through writ petitions under Article 226 of the Constitution. Unfortunately as past instances of blocking under S69A reveal the provisions are littered with procedural deficiencies, amplified manifold by the authorities responsible for interpreting and implementing the orders.

Problematically, an opaque confidentiality criteria built into the blocking rules mandates secrecy in requests and recommendations for blocking and places written orders outside the purview of public scrutiny. As there are no comprehensive list of blocked websites or of the legal orders, the public has to rely on ISPs leaking orders, or media reports to understand the censorship regime in India. RTI applications requesting further information on the implementation of these safeguards have at best provided incomplete information.

Historically, the courts in India have held that Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India is as much about the right to receive information as it is to disseminate, and when there is a chilling effect on speech, it also violates the right to receive information. Therefore, if a website is blocked citizens have a constitutional right to know the legal grounds on which access is being restricted. Just like the government announces and clarifies the grounds when banning a book, users have a right to know the grounds for restrictions on their speech online.

Unfortunately, under the present blocking regime in India there is no easy way for a service provider to comply with a blocking order while also notifying users that censorship has taken place. The ‘Blocking Rules’ require notice “person or intermediary” thus implying that notice may be sent to either the originator or the intermediary. Further, the confidentiality clause raises the presumption that nobody beyond the intermediaries ought to know about a block.

Naturally, intermediaries interested in self-preservation and avoiding conflict with the government become complicit in maintaining secrecy in blocking orders. As a result, it is often difficult to determine why content is inaccessible and users often mistake censorship for technical problem in accessing content. Consequently, pursuing legal recourse or trying to hold the government accountable for their censorious activity becomes a challenge. In failing to consider the constitutional merits of the confidentiality clause, the Supreme Court has shied away from addressing the over-broad reach of the executive.

Secrecy in removing or blocking access is a global problem that places limits on the transparency expected from ISPs. Across many jurisdictions intermediaries are legally prohibited from publicising filtering orders as well as information relating to content or service restrictions. For example in United Kingdom, ISPs are prohibited from revealing blocking orders related to terrorism and surveillance. In South Korea, the Korean Communications Standards Commission holds public meetings that are open to the public. However, the sheer volume of censorship (i.e. close to 10,000 URLs a month) makes it unwieldy for public oversight.

As the Manila Principles note, providing users with an explanation and reasons for placing restrictions on their speech and expression increases civic engagement. Transparency standards will empower citizens to demand that companies and governments they interact with are more accountable when it comes to content regulation. It is worth noting, for conduits as opposed to content hosts, it may not always be technically feasible for to provide a notice when content is unavailable due to filtering. A new standard helps improve transparency standards for network level intermediaries and for websites bound by confidentiality requirements. The recently introduced HTTP code for errors is a critical step forward in cataloguing censorship on the Internet.

A standardised code for censorship

On December 21, 2015, the Internet Engineering Standards Group (IESG) which is the organisation responsible for reviewing and updating the internet’s operating standards approved the publication of 451-’An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles’. The code provides intermediaries a standardised way to notify users know when a website is unavailable following a legal order. Publishing the code allows intermediaries to be transparent about their compliance with court and executive orders across jurisdictions and is a huge step forward for capturing online censorship. HTTP code 451 was introduced by software engineer Tim Bray and the code’s name is an homage to Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451.

Bray began developing the code after being inspired by a blog post by Terence Eden calling for a censorship error code. The code’s official status comes after two years of discussions within the technical community and is a result of campaigning from transparency and civil society advocates who have been pushing for clearer labelling of internet censorship. Initially, the code received pushback from within the technical community for reasons enumerated by Mark Nottingham, Chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group in his blog. However, soon sites began using the code on an experimental and unsanctioned basis and faced with increasing demand for and feedback, the code was accepted.

The HTTP code 451 works as a machine-readable flag and has immense potential as a tool for organisations and users who want to quantify and understand censorship on the internet. Cataloguing online censorship is a challenging, time-consuming and expensive task. The HTTP code 451 circumvents confidentiality obligations built into blocking or licensing regimes and reduces the cost of accessing blocking orders.

The code creates a distinction between websites blocked following a court or an executive order, and when information is inaccessible due to technical errors. If implemented widely, Bray’s new code will help prevent confusion around blocked sites. The code addresses the issue of the ISP’s misleading and inaccurate usage of Error 403 ‘Forbidden’ (to indicate that the server can be reached and understood the request, but refuses to take any further action) or 404 ‘Not Found’ (to indicate that the requested resource could not be found but may be available again in the future).

Adoption of the new standard is optional, though at present there are no laws in India that prevent intermediaries doing so. Implementing a standardised machine-readable flag for censorship will go a long way in bolstering the accountability of ISPs that have in the past targeted an entire domain instead of the specified URL. Adoption of the standard by ISPs will also improve the understanding of the burden imposed on intermediaries for censoring and filtering content as presently, there is no clarity on what constitutes compliance. Of course, censorious governments may prohibit the use of the code, for example by issuing an order that specifies not only that a page be blocked, but also precisely which HTTP return code should be used. Though such sanctions should be viewed as evidence of systematic rights violation and totalitarian regimes.

In India where access to software code repositories such as Github and Sourceforge are routinely restricted, the need for such code is obvious. The use of the code will improve confidence in blocking practices, allowing users to understand the grounds on which their right to information is being restricted. Improving transparency around censorship is the only way to build trust between the government and its citizens about the laws and policies applicable to internet content.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-jyoti-panday-january-29-2016-internet-has-a-new-standard-for-censorship

The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:40:05Z

Talk by Kiran Sahi

The Centre for Internet and Society invites you to a talk by Kiran Sahi on 'The Internet and Illusions of Space and Liberty'. Kiran will use this talk as an opportunity to look at the parallels that can be drawn between the spatial elements of the mind, corporal physical space, and the virtual domains of the internet. Reflecting on the roles of these parallel domains, we can discuss how dissident elements within society, traditionally found in geographical wildernesses, have found new opportunities for freedom in the realms of the internet. The talk will also explore the idea of the internet as a heterotopia, a safe space for displaced realities, and the pressures which make it adopt a panoptic structure.

Speaker

Kiran Sahi is is a designer and educator working from his home in a village north of Bangalore. His work involves presenting and interpreting the changing socio-political geography of his locality for teachers and students visiting from international academic institutions and education authorities. He also advises on local education development projects. Kiran works as a consultant design faculty, teaching materials and sculptural design, and runs a ceramic studio that produces large scale ceramic murals for public spaces. His previous work has involved exploring cultural narratives and their visual representations. He has been interested in exploring the possibilities of a collaborative community based business involving professional designers and local craftsmen.

Time and Date

Saturday, 7 March, 2009; 5.00-6.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/the-internet-and-illusions-of-space-and-liberty

The India Privacy Monitor Map

maria — 2013-10-09T16:26:14Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has started the first Privacy Watch in India! Check out our map which includes data on the UID, NPR and CCTNS schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of drones throughout the country.

In a country of twenty-eight diverse states and seven union territories, it remained unclear to what extent surveillance, biometric and other privacy-intrusive schemes are being implemented. We are trying to make up for this by mapping out data in every single state in India on the UID, CCTNS and NPR schemes, as well as on the installation of CCTV cameras and the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones.

In particular, the map in its current format includes data on the following:

UID: The Unique Identification Number (UID), also known as AADHAAR, is a 12-digit unique identification number which the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) is currently issuing for all residents in India (on a voluntary basis). Each UID is stored in a centralised database and linked to the basic demographic and biometric information of each individual. The UIDAI and AADHAAR currently lack legal backing.

NPR: Under the National Population Register (NPR), the demographic data of all residents in India is collected on a mandatory basis. The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) supplements the NPR with the collection of biometric data and the issue of the AADHAAR number.

CCTV: Closed-circuit television cameras which can produce images or recordings for surveillance purposes.

UAV: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), otherwise known as drones, are aircrafts without a human pilot on board. The flight of a UAV is controlled either autonomously by computers in the vehicle or under the remote control of a pilot on the ground or in another vehicle. UAVs are used for surveillance purposes.

CCTNS: The Crime and Criminal Tracking Networks and Systems (CCTNS) is a nationwide networking infrastructure for enhancing efficiency and effectiveness of policing and sharing data among 14,000 police stations across India.

Our India Privacy Monitor Map can be viewed through the following link: http://cis-india.org/cisprivacymonitor

This map is part of on-going research and will hopefully expand to include other schemes and projects which are potentially privacy-intrusive. We encourage all feedback and additional data!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-privacy-monitor-map

The India Conference on Cyber Security and Cyber Governance

praskrishna — 2014-10-13T07:10:19Z

Following the success of CYFY 2013 the CYFY 2014 will be held from October 15 to 17, 2014 in New Delhi. The Centre for Internet and Society is a knowledge partner for this event and Sunil Abraham is participating as a panelist in the session "Privacy is Dead".

Click to download the event details. The event brochure can be downloaded here.

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