Centre for Internet and Society

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

Disinformation in the Indian Digital News Media Market

pranav — 2021-07-06T09:15:16Z

The Centre for Internet and Society and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) are launching a study into the risk of disinformation on digital news platforms in India, creating an index that is intended to serve donors and brands with a neutral assessment of news sites that they can utilise to defund disinformation.

To register, please visit this link: https://forms.gle/VDCFpzDyjCbRdP559

India’s news consumption is increasingly dominated by the internet. In 2021, it is estimated that 284 million online users in India will consume their news digitally in the country’s eight top languages, a figure which has nearly doubled since 2016. Yet, greater reliance on online news does not equate to greater trust. A greater share of Indians trust news from newspapers and magazines (55 percent) than do online sources (34 percent).

The harms of disinformation are proliferating around the globe—threatening our elections, our health, and our shared sense of facts. The infodemic laid bare by COVID-19 conspiracy theories clearly shows that disinformation costs peoples’ lives. Websites masquerading as news outlets are driving and profiting financially from the situation.

One effective means of combating disinformation is to target its funding sources. In this report, we analysed 56 websites based on the GDI risk rating, which provides advertisers, ad tech companies and platforms with greater information about a range of disinformation flags related to a site’s content (reliability of content), operations (operational and editorial integrity) and context (perceptions of brand trust).

We invite you to the launch event of the report Media Market Risk Ratings: India, and a panel discussion focused on online misinformation and disinformation in India, the role of digital news publishers, and effective strategies to combat disinformation.

See more details and an agenda here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/disinformation-in-the-indian-digital-news-media-market

Digital Rights and ISP Accountability in India: An Analysis of Policies and Practices PDF

pranav — 2025-01-23T09:59:44Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-rights-and-isp-accountability-in-india-an-analysis-of-policies-and-practices-pdf

Digital IDs

pranav — 2019-10-18T13:55:06Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-identity

Digital ID Kenya Case Study

pranav — 2020-03-02T13:15:55Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-id-kenya-case-study

Digital ID India Case Study

pranav — 2020-03-02T11:30:30Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-id-india-case-study

Digital ID Healthcare Case Study

pranav — 2020-03-02T11:46:25Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/digital-id-healthcare-case-study

Dialogues on AI - Ethics of AI for India

pranav — 2018-07-01T07:01:58Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) organized the first session of the "Dialogues on AI" Roundtables in collaboration with Facebook on April 27, 2018 at Omidyar Network office in Bengaluru.

Sunil Abraham moderated one of the three sessions, and the event saw a total of 24 participants from industry, academia, law/policy, and civil society. Ambika Tandon, Shweta Mohandas, and Pranav Manjesh Bidare also attended the event.

Ethics of AI for India

Facebook and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) jointly present the first in a national series of roundtables focussing on emerging policy, ethical, and governance concerns relating to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in India. These roundtables aim to stimulate the discourse in India by providing curated, closed-door settings for a diverse group of experts to come together to advance the Indian AI narrative.

The first roundtable – in Bangalore – is designed to draw from the extensive regional expertise available in India’s technology hub and serve as a broader foundation for future roundtables. With the abundance of AI talent in the region, we have designed this first interaction to address several foundational yet critical questions surrounding AI. We hope that this discussion and learnings from it will serve as a key base and starting point for future discourse – intellectually driven from Bangalore – and will lay benchmarks for subsequent development and thought leadership in the area.

The roundtable focused on three key threads:

AI – Evolving a Common Terminology: This thread will aim to provide a primer to the AI revolution and help newcomers and experienced professionals alike evolve a common framework and taxonomy to guide policy discussions, research, and future discourse. Discussions will look to distil conceptual clarity on topics like artificial intelligence v. machine learning v. deep learning and provide technical and philosophical foundations to those from diverse fields.
AI Ethics: This thread will aim to stimulate and provoke discussion on the ethical norms that must underpin research, development, and the use of AI. Specific issues for discussion include openness, transparency, privacy, and moral issues. We expect a key part of this discussion will revolve around questions of whether specific laws or regulations are required to account for questions posed by AI in its various forms.
AI for India: The last thread of this discussion will aim to transition the debate on ethics and policy towards the application realm. Specifically, this discussion will look to focus on how the Indian public and private sector actors can capitalise on developments in AI to drive social and economic change. From a governance point of view, we will also look to cover how AI can be used to tackle key challenges in public distribution, law and order, regulation, and defence. We expect that key questions will revolve around deployment of AI towards governance, service delivery, manufacturing, and the effect of AI on employment.

Event Primer

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/dialogues-on-ai-ethics-of-ai-for-india

Cybersecurity

pranav — 2018-08-13T11:32:57Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cybersecurity

Cyber-Security Mapping

pranav — 2018-12-10T10:10:07Z

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

Cyber Norms Concept Note

pranav — 2018-08-20T06:59:36Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cyber-norms-concept-note