Posts
When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind?
- July 18, 2011
How do you know yourself to be different from others? What defines the daily life that you live and the knowledge you produce in the span of this life? Is all that information yours or are you a mere stakeholder on behalf of the State whose subject you are? What does privacy really mean? In a society that is increasingly relying on information to identify people, collecting and archiving ‘personal’ details of your lives, your name, age, passport details, ration card number, call records etc, how private is your tweet, status update, text message or simply, your restaurant bill?
Read more →My Experiment with Scam Baiting
- July 15, 2011
Today, as I am sure many of you have experienced, Internet scams are widespread and very deceptive. As part of my research into privacy and the Internet, I decided to follow a scam and attempt to fully understand how Internet scams work, and what privacy implications they have for Internet users. Though there are many different types of scams that take place over the Internet —identity scams, housing scams, banking scams— just to name a few. I decided to look in depth at the lottery scam.
Read more →RTI and Third Party Information: What Constitutes the Private and Public?
- July 12, 2011
The passing of the Right to Information Act, 2005 was seen as giving an empowering tool in the hands of the citizens of India, six years post its implementation, loopholes have surfaced with misuse of the many fundamental concepts, which have yet not been defined to allow for a consistent pattern of decisions. Among many problems that emerge with the Act, a major problem is defining the extent to which an individual has access to other people’s information. While most of us tend to think that asking for other people’s phone numbers, personal details like passport number or IT returns are private and would be kept so, under the RTI Act and as seen in the Central Information Commission (CIC) decisions, all of these details can be availed of by someone who doesn’t know you at all!
Read more →Privacy and Security Can Co-exist
- June 22, 2011
The blanket surveillance the Centre seeks is not going to make India more secure, writes Sunil Abraham in this article published in Mail Today on June 21, 2011.
Read more →Copyright Enforcement and Privacy in India
- June 14, 2011
Copyright can function contradictorily, as both the vehicle for the preservation of privacy as well as its abuse, writes Prashant Iyengar. The research examines the various ways in which privacy has been implicated in the shifting terrain of copyright enforcement in India and concludes by examining the notion of the private that emerges from a tapestry view of the relevant sections of Copyright Act.
Read more →Interesting, and very timely
- June 14, 2011
I agree that we English-speakers should bow to a dilution of our language's prevalence. The only proviso should be a key to the terms used, [...]
Read more →Snooping Can Lead to Data Abuse
- June 09, 2011
THE NATGRID, aiming to link databases of 21 departments and ministries for better counter-terror measures, adopts blunt policy approach, subjecting every citizen to the same level of blanket surveillance, instead of a targeted approach that intelligently focuses on geographic or demographic areas that are currently important, writes Sunil Abraham in this article published by Mail Today on June 9, 2011.
Read more →The New Right to Privacy Bill 2011 — A Blind Man's View of the Elephunt
- June 09, 2011
Over the past few days various newspapers have reported the imminent introduction in Parliament, during the upcoming Monsoon session, of a Right to Privacy Bill. Since the text of this bill has not yet been made accessible to the public, this post attempts to grope its way – through guesswork – towards a picture of what the Bill might look like from a combined reading of all the newspaper accounts, writes Prashant Iyengar in this blog post which was posted on the Privacy India website on June 8, 2011.
Read more →Do You Want to be Watched?
- June 09, 2011
The new rules under the IT Act are an assault on our freedom, says Sunil Abraham in this article published in Pragati on June 8, 2011.
Read more →The Digital is Political
- June 08, 2011
Technologies are not just agents of politics, there is politics in their design, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in Down to Earth in the Issue of June 15, 2011.
Read more →