Centre for Internet and Society

icnl introduction revised

pranav — 2021-01-11T10:07:02Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/icnl-introduction-revised

How to Shut Down Internet Shutdowns Descriptive Image

pranav — 2020-02-03T08:14:18Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/how-to-shut-down-internet-shutdowns-descriptive-image

How to Shut Down Internet Shutdowns

pranav — 2020-02-03T11:13:12Z

This talk will focus on the challenges and opportunities for research on internet shutdowns after the judgement of the Supreme Court in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India. Stepping beyond the judgement, there will be a wider discussion on the practice of whitelists, blocking powers of the central government.

About the Speaker

Apar Gupta is the Executive Director of the Internet Freedom Foundation.

Apar has been fighting the good fight for digital rights. While in law school almost 20 years ago, he wrote a legal commentary on the IT Act that is now in its third edition. As a lawyer in the Supreme Court, he worked on landmark cases such as on Section 66A, Intermediary Liability, Internet Shutdowns, the Right to Privacy and Privacy.

He also helped create public campaigns to advance net neutrality, reform defamation laws, fight Internet shutdowns and create a privacy statute. Apar previously ran his own successful law firm, was profiled in Outlook Magazine and listed in Forbes India's list of 30 under 30. He has also worked as a commercial litigator and partner in top law firms, written papers cited widely in local and international publications and taught courses at NLS and NLU.

RSVP here, or by sending an email Torsha (torsha@cis-india.org).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/how-to-shutdown-internet-shutdowns

Governing ID: Principles for Evalution

pranav — 2020-03-02T08:20:55Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/governing-id-principles-for-evalution

GDI Launch Event Concept Note pdf

pranav — 2021-07-06T09:10:15Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/gdi-launch-event-concept-note-pdf

Fundamental Right to Privacy — Three Years of the Puttaswamy Judgment

pranav — 2020-08-24T07:46:10Z

Today marks three years since the Supreme Court of India recognised the fundamental right to privacy, but the ideals laid down in the Puttaswamy Judgment are far from being completely realized. Through our research, we invite you to better understand the judgment and its implications, and take stock of recent issues pertaining to privacy.

Amber Sinha dissects the Puttaswamy Judgment through an analysis of the sources, scope and structure of the right, and its possible limitations. [link]

Through a visual guide to the fundamental right to privacy, Amber Sinha and Pooja Saxena trace how courts in India have viewed the right to privacy since Independence, explain how key legal questions were resolved in the Puttaswamy Judgement, and provide an account of the four dimensions of privacy — space, body, information and choice — recognized by the Supreme Court. [link]

Based on publicly available submissions, press statements, and other media reports, Arindrajit Basu and Amber Sinha track the political evolution of the data protection ecosystem in India, on EPW Engage. They discuss how this has, and will continue to impact legislative and policy developments. [link]

For the AI Policy Exchange, Arindrajit Basu and Siddharth Sonkar examine the Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS), and define the key legal and policy questions related to privacy concerns around the adoption of AFRS by governments around the world. [link]

Over the past decade, reproductive health programmes in India have been digitising extensive data about pregnant women. In partnership with Privacy International, we studied the Mother and Child Tracking system (MCTS), and Ambika Tandon presents the impact on the privacy of mothers and children in the country. [link]

While the right to privacy can be used to protect oneself from state surveillance, Mira Swaminathan and Shubhika Saluja write about the equally crucial problem of lateral surveillance — surveillance that happens between individuals, and within neighbourhoods, and communities — with a focus on this issue during the COVID-19 crisis. [link]

Finally, take a dive into the archives of the Centre for Internet and Society to read our work, which was cited in the Puttaswamy judgment — essays by Ashna Ashesh, Vidushi Marda and Bhairav Acharya that displaced the notion that privacy is inherently a Western concept, by attempting to locate the constructs of privacy in Classical Hindu [link], and Islamic Laws [link]; and Acharya’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly, which highlighted the need for privacy jurisprudence to reflect theoretical clarity, and be sensitive to unique Indian contexts [link].

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/fundamental-right-to-privacy-three-years-of-the-puttaswamy-judgment

Fundamental Right to Privacy — Four Years of the Puttaswamy Judgment

pranav — 2021-08-24T04:55:05Z

Background

On 24 August 2017, in a nine-judge bench decision, the Indian Supreme Court located a fundamental right to privacy within the Indian Constitutional jurisprudence. Previously, the right to privacy has had a dubious existence in India’s judicial history, and it has been suggested that privacy is inherently a Western concept. However, essays by Ashna Ashesh, Vidushi Marda, and Bhairav Acharya — cited in the Puttaswamy judgment — dispelled this notion, by attempting to locate the constructs of privacy in Classical Hindu [link], and Islamic Laws [link]; and Acharya’s article in the Economic and Political Weekly, which highlighted the need for privacy jurisprudence to reflect theoretical clarity, and be sensitive to unique Indian contexts [link].

Through the six opinions in the Puttaswamy judgment, the Supreme Court discussed various aspects of the right to privacy, reading into it the constitutional values of dignity and liberty. In Amber Sinha’s three-part essay, he dissected these components of the right, discussing the sources, structure and scope of the right in detail. [link] Further, a visual guide prepared by Amber Sinha, and Pooja Saxena provides a rich story of privacy in independent India, as well as a visualisation of the various types of privacy the court located within the broader constitutional right. [link]

Privacy, Public Places and Surveillance

“Privacy attaches to the person and not to the place where it is associated.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy

The right to privacy initially focused on protecting “private” spaces. These included spaces such as the home, from state interference. This drew from the belief that “a person’s home is their castle”. However, this idea of privacy is not limited simply to a person’s home. Privacy rests in ‘person’ and not in ‘places’. Therefore, even outside one’s home, other spaces could also acquire the character of private spaces, and even public spaces can afford a degree of privacy.

In a paper for the Centre for Development Informatics, Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon discussed the wholesale implementation of CCTVs in New Delhi. They deconstructed the narrative that equates greater surveillance with greater safety, more so in the case of women’s safety. Borrowing from feminist approaches to surveillance and privacy, they focussed on lived experiencess of surveillance with a focus on women living in informal settlements in New Delhi to argue that the ‘gaze of CCTV’ is intersectionally mediated and cast upon those already marginalized. [link]

Similarly, in a three part blog series for AI Policy Exchange, Arindrajit Basu and Siddharth Sonkar explain Automated Facial Recognition Systems (AFRS) while defining key privacy related legal and policy questions underpinning the adoption of AFRS. They go on to answer these questions by interrogating the existing data privacy laws in light of the mosaic theory of privacy, noting the dangers of ‘data-veillance’ and the need to recognize necessary safeguards. [link]

Biometrics

“The integrity of the body and the sanctity of the mind can exist on the foundation that each individual possesses an inalienable ability and right to preserve a private space in which the human personality can develop.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy

Biometrics was central to the Puttaswamy judgment, as it was the collection of biometric data by the government to build the Aadhaar system that triggered this case, and the urgent need to commit the State to guarding residents’ fundamental right to privacy.

Following the Puttaswamy judgement, the Supreme Court tested the Aadhaar program against the proportionality principle it had previously established, which required every privacy-infringing measure introduced by the State to be justified by the tests of legitimate state aim, suitability, necessity, and proportional result. Shruti Trikanad explores how the test was interpreted, in comparison to similar applications for biometric identity systems in Kenya, Jamaica, and Mauritius. [link]

Using the principles established by the Puttaswamy judgment, Vrinda Bhandari, Shruti Trikand, and Amber Sinha created a framework to evaluate the governance and legitimacy of biometric digital identity systems. Through three kinds of checks — Rule of Law tests, Rights based tests, and Risks based tests — this scheme is a ready guide for evaluation of Digital ID. [link]

Privacy of information

“Informational privacy is a facet of the right to privacy.” - Justice Chandrachud, Puttaswamy

In the age of Big Data, the collection and analysis of personal data has tremendous economic value. However, these economic interests should not be pursued at the expense of personal privacy. Similarly, modern technology provides excessive opportunities for governments to monitor and survey the lives of citizens. Informed consent and meaningful choice while sharing information is central to the idea of informational privacy.

Based on publicly available submissions, press statements, and other media reports, Arindrajit Basu and Amber Sinha track the political evolution of the data protection ecosystem in India, in EPW Engage. They discuss how this has, and will continue to impact legislative and policy developments. [link]

The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill forms an important part of the conversation about India’s informational privacy regime, and once notified, will have significant impact on the way data protection is regulated. Explore the Bill, through a privacy-by-design lens, with focus on its notice and consent communication, its visual interface design and interaction with users, and the role and accountability of design in its interpretation. This was created by Saumyaa Naidu, Akash Sheshadri, Shweta Mohandas, and Pranav MB. [link]

Further, in anticipation of the PDP Bill, Shweta Reddy wrote about the minimum compliance measures that Indian organizations should take, to reduce probability of a crisis during the implementation phase, as was seen in the case of European organizations and the GDPR. [link]

Pandemic and privacy

Given the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the eager techno-solutionism displayed by the government in adopting invasive and potentially unconstitutional technologies during these times, the principles elucidated in Puttaswamy are now more important than ever in upholding our rights. As Lord Atkin had stated in his famous dissent in the case of Liversidge v Anderson: “amid the clash of arms, the laws are not silent,” it is important to ensure that any potential solutions to the problems created by the pandemic are circumscribed by the constitution.

In an essay for the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), Amber Sinha, Pallavi Bedi and Aman Nair interrogate the techno-solutionist response underpinning the shifts towards the digital in the governance agenda of the Indian State in the last two decades. They focus on the government's vaccination efforts during the pandemic to ground their arguments highlighting the issues of accessibility and privacy. [link]

Writing for the Deccan Herald, Aman Nair and Pallavi Bedi note how pandemic technology infringes upon data privacy, resulting in surveillance and exclusion. They suggest that the trade-off between privacy and pandemic technologies is unjustified given India’s digital divide that makes digital-driven approaches inefficient. [link]

The practical implications of such techno-solutionism can be troubling. In this blog-post, for instance, Pallavi Bedi writes about the privacy concerns haunting the Co-Win platform noting the lack of privacy policies governing the app, lack of clarity vis-a-vis data sharing between different apps such as Co-Win and Aarogya Setu and how it would violate user consent if it is used to develop digital health IDS. [link] In another blog post, Divyank Katira compares the benefits of Digital Vaccine Certificates with regular paper-based ones while focussing on the privacy implications of their use with recommendations on how to make the technology more privacy-respecting. [link]

Moving beyond the concerns raised by the adoption of digital measures by the government, Vipul Kharbanda examines other measures, such as releasing the names of COVID positive patients, putting up notices/posters or barricades around the houses of patients. He analyzes these measures against the existing privacy jurisprudence, including that laid down by the Puttaswamy judgment [link], [link].

Finally, during this pandemic, governments across the world have employed aggressive technological measures to trace individuals and enforce quarantine, costing individuals their privacy in exchange for potential benefit to the collective public health. Mira Swaminathan and Shubhika Saluja document the lateral surveillance this had encouraged, with people keeping a close watch on their neighbours’ behaviours. [link]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/fundamental-right-to-privacy-2014-four-years-of-the-puttaswamy-judgment

Fintech Sec Standards Event Concept Note

pranav — 2019-10-15T09:08:51Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/fintech-sec-standards-event-concept-note

EXTRATERRITORIAL ALGORITHMIC SURVEILLANCE AND THE INCAPACITATION OF INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW

pranav — 2019-12-31T10:55:51Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/extraterritorial-algorithmic-surveillance-and-the-incapacitation-of-international-human-rights-law

Event Report: Consultation on Gendered Information Disorder in India pdf

pranav — 2024-10-15T10:51:24Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/event-report-consultation-on-gendered-information-disorder-in-india-pdf

Engaging with the Covid-19 Crisis

pranav — 2020-07-15T09:31:51Z

In the last six months, COVID-19 has had a far-reaching impact on the world, including on the digital sphere, how people interact with it, and its mediation of social and economic exchanges. Researchers and practitioners at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) have responded to this dynamic landscape from different lenses.

WikiProject India COVID-19 Task Force

The Access to Knowledge team at CIS, along with the Wikidata editor community has been maintaining a reliable district and state-wise database of COVID-19 case statistics in India (link). If you are a Wikidata editor, please consider contributing or encouraging others to join this effort.

COVID-19 Apps

Based on publicly available information, Pallavi Bedi presents a comparative analysis of COVID-19 apps launched by different state governments in India, and examines their governing policies regarding privacy and data protection (link).
In light of the central-government’s release of the contact tracing app Aarogya Setu, Siddharth Sonkar’s report seeks to constructively engage with privacy concerns surrounding the app and its operations, and works towards making privacy safeguards governing its operability more consistent with international best practices (link).
Amber Sinha examines the false binary between privacy and surveillance created during a pandemic, and proposes a necessary and proportional method of contact tracing (link).
Aman Nair writes about the lack of oversight present in the Kerala government’s deal with Sprinklr Inc, the violations to the right to privacy, and how legislation that is currently being proposed would fail to prevent situations like this in the future (link).

Gig Economy and Labour Rights

With Tandem Research, CIS organized a webinar to interact with unions representing gig workers and researchers studying labour rights and gig work, to uncover the experiences of gig workers during the lockdown. Based on the discussion, a charter of recommendations was prepared with contributions from participants, and was shared with public and private stakeholders (link).
With support from three domestic workers’ unions, the Domestic Workers Rights Union, Bruhat Bangalore Gruhakarmika Sangha, and Manegelasa Kaarmikara Union, Geeta Menon put together a report that shines light on the plight of domestic workers in Bengaluru during the lockdowns, and now as the lockdown eases. It focuses on how government and administrative bodies, and resident welfare associations, have been culpable in further pushing domestic workers to the margins (link).
Aayush Rathi and Sreyan Chatterjee argue how the suspension of labour laws proposed (and enforced) by several states in India as a part of their COVID-19 impact response, have material and discursive impact on the future of work in India (link).
Ambika Tandon discusses the impact of Covid-19 on the gig economy in Asia, especially reflecting on the measures (or lack thereof) taken by companies to support workers (link).
Zothan Mawii, Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon spoke with the leaders of four workers' unions and labour researchers, including the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) and the Ola and Uber Drivers and Owners’ Association (OTU), to identify recommended actions that public agencies and private companies may undertake to better support the urgent needs of gig workers in India (link).

Lateral Surveillance

Drawing from multifaceted research on surveillance around the world, Mira Swaminathan and Shubhika Saluja analyse the unique domain of lateral surveillance, and its heightened impacts on the ‘culture of suspicion’ created between social classes, especially during a pandemic (link).
On the latest episode of our In Flux podcast, Shweta Reddy and Mira Swaminathan discuss COVID-19 related surveillance with Torsha Sarkar, and talk about balancing a public health objective with protection of our fundamental rights (link).

Misinformation

In an article in The Wire, Mira Swaminathan argues that the only efficient and effective way to prevent the spread of misinformation related to the pandemic is self-verification, which means that people who consume the data on an everyday basis must educate themselves and acquire the skills to tackle it (link).
Torsha Sarkar examines content moderation measures taken by online intermediaries to tackle harmful information related to COVID-19 on their platforms, and the recommended ways in which information around these decisions can be preserved for better research going forward (link).

Gender justice

In light of a large digital divide across the usage of technology by women, Ambika Tandon and Mira Swaminathan examine how effective calls to domestic abuse helplines are during lockdown (link).

Data Protection

As part of The Bastion’s series on the education sector and children’s privacy, Pallavi Bedi writes about protecting the privacy of children on ed-tech platforms, especially as students are now more than ever dependent on such platforms for their learning (link).
Shweta Reddy was a panelist on Medianama’s Roundtable on Privacy in the era of COVID-19, where she spoke about privacy checks for data collection process for the purposes of public health during the pandemic (link).
Gurshabad Grover was a discussant for the webinar on Health, Encryption & COVID-19: Keeping people and countries safer online, organized by Internet Society, Center for Democracy and Technology and Global Partners Digital, where he spoke about recent threats to end-to-end encrypted communications, including ‘traceability’ in India and the EARN IT in the US (link).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/engaging-with-the-covid-19-crisis

ED Call Image

pranav — 2022-08-23T07:32:20Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/ed-call-image

Draft Model Fintech Security Standards: Closed Door Consultation

pranav — 2019-10-15T13:20:21Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been researching privacy and security standards in the Indian ‘Fintech space’ for the past year. One component of our research has been to create Draft Security Standards for Fintech Entities, which are more specific than the requirements of the SPDI Rules. We hope that these will serve as a set of useful parameters that enables innovation while furthering privacy and security. Through this consultation, we hope to further explore these gaps, understand the hurdles that players in the market may face when complying with these requirements and thereby improve these parameters.

More details about the event can be found here.

If you would like to participate in this consultation event, please send an email to pranav@cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/draft-model-fintech-security-standards-closed-door-consultation

Draft Fintech Security Rules

pranav — 2019-10-15T08:48:18Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/draft-fintech-security-rules

Domestic Work and Platforms Presentation

pranav — 2019-11-29T10:08:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation