Centre for Internet and Society

Intelligence agencies will not have open access to Aadhaar data: UIDAI chief

praskrishna — 2016-10-21T01:32:56Z

Intelligence agencies will not have free access to Aadhaar data, a top government official said on Thursday, looking to assuage fears of abuse of personal information.

The article by Aloke Tikku was published in the Hindustan Times on October 20, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), which issued identity cards to 1.07 billion Indians, last month decided to retain data related to the verification of Aadhaar-enabled transactions for seven years, leading to security concerns over data safety.

As reported by HT on Monday, privacy experts expressed concerns that transaction data retained for so long could be accessed by the security establishment for surveillance on individuals without sufficient grounds.

“This fear is completely misplaced,” ABP Pandey, UIDAI’s chief executive officer told HT in an interview.

Security agencies can access the data only in case of national security after they get the nod of an oversight committee headed by the cabinet secretary. This committee has to clear every order made by the designated joint secretary-level officer before the information is shared, he said.

“You cannot have any legal protection stronger than this,” Pandey added.

Aadhaar transaction data is not only protected by the most powerful, contemporary law to restrict access but also by strong cryptography.

“Even if someone attempts, the 2048-bit encryption is so strong that it will take them millions of computers and billions of years to decrypt the data,” he said.

A vocal critic of Aadhaar’s design, Sunil Abraham of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) suggested he wouldn’t rely too much on the legal framework. “You cannot put a legal band-aid on a broken technological solution. You need to get privacy and security right by design,” the director of the Bengaluru-based research body said.

Abraham said the problem could have been averted if the UIDAI did not store the data in a centralised form. Instead, it could have used its digital signature to sign proof of authentication that could be stored by the authenticating agency and the citizen on a smart card.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-aloke-tikku-october-20-2016-intelligence-agencies-will-not-have-open-access-to-aadhaar-data

Inputs to the Report on the Non-Personal Data Governance Framework

sumandro — 2020-12-30T09:40:52Z

This submission presents a response by researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) to the draft Report on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework prepared by the Committee of Experts under the Chairmanship of Shri Kris Gopalakrishnan. The inputs are authored by Aayush Rathi, Aman Nair, Ambika Tandon, Pallavi Bedi, Sapni Krishna, and Shweta Mohandas (in alphabetical order), and reviewed by Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

Text of submitted inputs: Read (PDF)

Report by the Committee of Experts on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework: Read (PDF)

Inputs

Clause 3.7 (v): The role of the Indian government in the operation of data markets

While highlighting the potential for India to be one of the top consumer and data markets of the world, it also sheds light on the concern about the possibility of data monopolies. The clause envisions the role of the Indian government as a regulator and a catalyst for domestic data markets.

In doing so, the clause does not acknowledge that the proactive and dominant roles of the Indian government in generation and reuse of data, based on the existing data collection practices, as well as the provisions that have been given, as under the compulsory sharing provisions in the Report, and would continue to be given by the Personal Data Protection Bill. In reality, the Indian government’s role is not just of a catalyst but also of a key player, potentially with monopolistic market power, in the domestic data market, especially due to the ongoing data marketplace initiatives as detailed in published policy and vision documents. [1]

Clause 3.8 (iv): Introducing collective privacy

The introduction of collective privacy has initiated an overdue discussion at the policy level to arrive at privacy formulations that account for limitations in the contemporary dominant social, legal and ethical paradigms of privacy premised on individual interests and personal harm. The notion of collective privacy has garnered contemporary attention with the rise of data processing technologies and business models that thrive on the collection and processing of aggregate information.

While the Report acknowledges that collective privacy is an evolving concept, it doesn’t attempt to define either collective or what privacy could entail in the context of a collective. The postulation of collective privacy as a legally binding right is bereft with challenges in both domestic and international legal frameworks. [2]

Central to these challenges is the representation of the group of the entity. While the Report illustrates harms that may be incurred by certain collectives that collective privacy could protect against, these illustrated collectives are already recognised in law as rights-holding groups (society members, for example), and/or share pre-determined attributes (sexual orientation, for example).

The Report does not acknowledge that the very technological processes that may have rendered the articulation of collective privacy necessary, also are intended to create ad-hoc and newer sets of individuals or groups with shared attributes. [3] In doing so, the Report furthers an ontology of groups having intuitive, predetermined attributes that exist naturally, or in law, whereas the intervention of data collection and processing technologies can determine shared group attributes afresh. Moreover, the Report also ignores that predetermined attributes are static, and in doing so, ignores a vast existing literature speaking to fluidity of identities and the intersectionality of identities that individuals in groups occupy. [4] We fully appreciate the challenges these pose in the determination of the legal contours of collective privacy. Much of the Report’s recommendations are premised on the idea of a predetermined collective, rendering more granular exploration of these ideas urgent.

Further, the Report also puts forth a limited conception of privacy as a safeguard against data-related harms that may be caused to collectives. In doing so, it dilutes the conceptualisation of individual privacy as articulated in Justice K. S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) and Anr. vs Union Of India And Ors. Notwithstanding this dilution, the illustrations also only indicate harms that may be caused by private actors. Any further recommendations should envision the harms that may also be caused by public data-driven processes, such as those incubated within the state machinery.

Clause 4.1 (iii) and Recommendation 1: Defining Non-Personal Data

The Report proposes the definition of non-personal data to include (i) data that was never related to an identified or identifiable natural person, and (ii) aggregated, anonymised personal data such that individual events are “no longer identifiable”. In doing so, they have attempted to extend protections to categories of data that fall outside the ambit of the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 (hereafter “PDP Bill”). The Report is cognizant of the fallible nature of anonymization techniques but fails to indicate how these may be addressed. The test of anonymization in regarding data as non-personal data requires further clarification. Anonymization, in and of itself, is an ambiguous standard. Scholarship has indicated that anonymised data may never be completely anonymous. [5] Despite this, the PDP Bill proposes a high threshold of zero-risk of anonymization in relation to personal data, to mean “such irreversible process of transforming or converting personal data to a form in which a data principal cannot be identified”. From a plain reading, it appears that the Report proposes a lower threshold of the anonymization requirements governing non-personal data. It is unclear how non-personal data would then be different from inferred data as described within the definition of personal data under the PDP Bill. This adds regulatory uncertainty making it imperative for the Committee to articulate bright-line, risk-based principles and rules for the test of anonymization. Such rules should also indicate the factors that ought to be taken into account to determine whether anonymization has occurred and the timescale of reference for anonymization outcomes. [6]

The recommendation also states that the data principal should "also provide consent for anonymisation and usage of this anonymized data while providing consent for collection and usage of his/her personal data". However the framing of this recommendation fails to mention the responsibility of the data fiduciary to provide notice to the data principal about the usage of the anonymized data while seeking the data principal’s consent for anonymization. The notice provided to the data principal should provide clear indication that consent of the data principal is based on their knowledge of the use of the anonymized data.

Clause 4.8 (i), (ii): Function of data custodians

The Report does not make it clear who may perform the role of data custodians. The use of data fiduciary indicates the potential import of the definition of ‘data fiduciary’ as specified under Clause 3.13 of the PDP Bill. However, this needs to be further clarified.

Clause 4.8 (iii): Data custodians’ “duty of care”

As is outlined in the following section on data trustees, it can be difficult for a singular entity to maintain a duty of care and undertake actions with the best interest of a community when that community consists of sub-communities that may be marginalised. Further, ‘duty of care’, ‘best interest’, and ‘absence of harm’ are not sufficient standards for data processing by data custodians. Recommendations to the effect of obligating data custodians to uphold the rights of data principals, including economic and fundamental rights need to be incorporated in the framework.

Clause 4.9: Data trustees

The committee’s suggestion that the “most appropriate representative body” should be the data trustee—that often being either the corresponding government entity or community body— is reasonable at face value. However, in the absence of any clear principles defining what constitutes “most appropriate” there are a number of potential issues that can appear:

Lack of means for selecting a data trustee: The report makes note of the fact that both private and public entities can be selected to be data trustees but offers no principles on how these data trustees can be selected, i.e. whether they are to be directly selected by the members of a community, and if so how. Any selection criteria or process prescribed has to keep in mind the following point regarding the potential lack of representation for marginalised communities that could arise from a direct selection of a data trustee by a group of people.

Issues of having a single data trustee for large scale communities and when dealing with marginalised communities: The report assumes that in instances wherein a community is spread across a geographic region, or consists of multiple sub-communities, then the data trustee will be the closest shared government authority (for example, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India being the data trustee for data regarding diabetes among Indian citizens).

This idea of a singular data trustee assumes that the ‘best interests’ of a community are uniform across that community. This can prove problematic especially when dealing with data obtained from marginalised communities that forms a part of a wider dataset. It is entirely possible to imagine that a smaller disenfranchised community may have interests that are not aligned with the general majority. In such a situation the Report is unclear as to whether the data trustee would have to ensure that the best interests of all groups are maintained, or would they be responsible for ensuring the best interests of the largest number of people within that community. There are power differentials between citizens, government agencies, and other entities described by the Report. This places citizens at risk of abuse of power by government entities in their role as trustees, who are effectively being empowered through this policy framework as opposed to a representative mechanism. It is recommended that data trustees be appointed by relevant communities through clear and representative mechanisms. Additionally, any individual should be able to file complaints regarding the discharge of community trust by data trustees. This is necessary as any subsequent rights vested in the community can only be exercised through the data trustee, and become unenforceable in the lack of an appropriate data trustee.

Any legislation that arises on the basis of this report will therefore have to not only provide a means for selecting the data trustee, but also safeguards for ensuring that data collected from marginalised communities are used keeping in mind their specific best interests—with these best interests being informed through consultation with that community.

Clause 4.10 (iii): Data trusts

Section 4.10 (iii) notes that data custodians may voluntarily share data in these data trusts. However it is unclear if such sharing must be done with the express consent of the relevant data trustee.

Clause 4.10 (iv): Mandatory sharing and competition

The fundamental premise of a mandatory data sharing regime seems increasingly distant from its practical impacts. The EU which earlier championed the cause now seems reluctant to further it on the face of studies which skews towards counteractive impacts of such steps. Such steps could apply to huge volumes of first-party data companies collect on their own assets, products and services, even though such data are among the least likely to create barriers to entry or contribute to abuses of dominant positions. [7] This is hence likely to bring in more chilling effect on innovation and investment than a pro-competition environment. The velocity of big data also adds to the futility of such data sharing mandates. [8] It is recommended that a sectoral analysis of this mandate be undertaken instead of an overarching stipulation.

The Report suggests extensive data sharing without addressing the extent of obligation on the private players to submit to these requests and process them. The availability of meta-data about the data collected may be made easily accessible under mandates of transparency. However, the access to the detailed underlying data will be difficult in most cases due to the current structure of entities functioning in cyberspace, evidenced by the lack of compliance to such mandates by Courts of Law in the EU. Such a system can easily eliminate the comparative advantage of smaller players, helping larger players with more money at their disposal enabling their growth and throttling the smaller players. It could have serious implications on data quality and integrity through the sharing of erroneous data. Access to superior quality digital services in India may also have to be compromised. If this regime is furthered without amends to address these concerns, it might end up counter productive.

Clause 5.1 (iv): Grievance redressal against state’s role

This clause acknowledges the vast potential for government authorities and other bodies to abuse their power as data trustee. In addition, it should describe the setting up of impartial and accessible mechanisms for citizens to complain against such abuse of power and appropriate penalties, including the removal of the data trustee.

Chapter 7, Recommendation 5: Purpose of data-sharing

Recommendation 5 leaves scope for “national security” as a sovereign purpose for data sharing. This continues to be in line with the trend of having an overarching national security clause, as in the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019. There could be provisions made to enable access to data for sovereign purposes without such broad definition, replacing it based on constitutional terms which will limit it to the confines laid down in the Constitution. This will effectively curb any misuse of the provision and strongly embed the proposed regulation of non-personal data on constitutional ethos. This can also prevent future conflicts with the fundamental rights.

Platform companies have leveraged their position in society to take on an ever-greater number of quasi-public functions, exercising new forms of unaccountable, transnational authority. It is not difficult to imagine that this trend can continue to non-platform companies, or even taken forward by these very entities which also have access to a large chunk of non-personal data. A strict division between sovereign purposes and core public interest purposes seems difficult. However, it is imperative to have a clearer definition of core public interest purposes and sovereign purposes. The broad based definition may facilitate reduced accountability. Separating government actions from sovereign purposes could bring forth the power imbalance between the State and its people, while in the case of the non-governmental entities, it will facilitate encroachment of government functions by private players. Both these cases may not consider the best interest of the data generators, or the people at large.

Clause 7.1 (i): Data needs of law enforcement

Clause 7.1 (i) allows for acquisition of data governed by this framework for crime mapping, devising anticipation and preventive measures, and for investigations and law enforcement. While this may be necessary to be granted to law enforcement in certain cases, this should happen only with an express permission of a court of law. Blanket executive access allows higher possibility of misuse by the people involved in law enforcement.

Clause 7.2 (iv): Use of health data as a pilot

The clause suggests the use of health sector data as a pilot use-case. This is highly undesirable due to the inherent nature of high sensitivity of the larger part of data related to the health sector. The high vulnerability of such data to harm the data principals should act as a deterrent in using this as the pilot use-case. Given the mass availability of data related to the health sector due to the pandemic, it creates further points of vulnerabilities which can be illegally monetised and misappropriated. It is recommended that this proposal be scrapped altogether.

Clause 7.2 (iii): Power of government bodies

As per this clause, data trustees or government bodies (who could also be acting as data trustees) can make requests for data sharing and place such data in appropriate data infrastructures or trusts. This presents a conflict of interest, as a data trust or government body can empower itself to be the data trustee. Such cases should be addressed within the scope of the framework.

Clause 8.2 (vii): Level-playing field for all Indian actors

In terms of this clause the “Non-Personal Data Authority (Authority) will ensure a level playing field for all Indian actors to fulfil the objective of maximising Indian data’s value to the Indian economy”. The emphasis on ensuring a level playing field for only Indian actors instead of non-discriminatory platform for all concerned actors irrespective of the country/nationality of the actor has the potential of violating India’s trade obligations under the WTO. Member states of the WTO are essentially restricted from discriminating between products and services coming from different WTO Members, and between foreign and domestic products and services unless they can avail of exceptions. There is also no clarity on what constitutes ‘Indian Actors’, would a Multi-National Corporation with its headquarters in a foreign State, but its subsidiaries in India also come within its ambit.

Clause 8.2 (x): Composition of the Authority

Clause 8.2 (x) states that the Authority will have some members with relevant industry experience. However, apart from this clause, the report is silent on the composition of the Authority. The report recognises that Authority will need individuals/organisations with specialised knowledge, i.e. data governance, technology, latest research and innovation in the field of non-personal data), however, it does not mention or refer to the role of civil society organisations and the need for representation from such organisations in the Authority.

The report frequently alludes to non-personal data being used for the best interest of the data principal and therefore, it is essential that the composition of the Authority reflect the inherent asymmetry of power between the data principal and the State. Considering that the Authority will also be responsible for sharing of community data and with determining the code of conduct for sharing of such data, it is important that the Authority also has adequate representation from civil society organisations along with groups or individuals having the necessary technological and legal skills.

Clause 8.2 (iii) and (vi): Roles and Responsibility of the Authority

A majority of the datasets in the country comprise of ‘mixed datasets’, i.e. it consists of both personal and non-personal data. However, there is lack of clarity about the coordination between the Data Protection Authority constituted under the PDP Bill and the Non-Personal Data Authority with regard to the regulation of such datasets. The Report refers to the European Union which provides that the Non-Personal Data Regulation applies to the Non-Personal Data of mixed datasets; if the Non-Personal Data part and the personal data parts are ‘inextricably linked’, the General Data Protection Regulation apply to the whole mixed dataset. However, it is unclear whether the Report also proposes the same mechanism for the regulation of mixed datasets.

Further, the contours of the enforcement role of the Committee should be specified and clearly laid down. Will the Committee also have penal powers as prescribed for the Data Protection Authority under the PDP Bill? Also, will the privacy concerns emanating from the risk of re-anonymisation of data be addressed by the NPD Committee or by the DPA under the PDP Bill. Ideally, it should be specified that any such privacy concerns will fall within the domain of the DPA as the data is then converted into personal data and the DPA will be empowered to deal with such issues.

Endnotes

[1] See Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. (2020). National Digital Health Blueprint. Government of India. https://main.mohfw.gov.in/sites/default/files/Final%20NDHB%20report_0.pdf; Tandon, A. (2019). Big Data and Reproductive Health in India: A Case Study of the Mother and Child Tracking System. https://cis-india.org/raw/big-data-reproductive-health-india-mcts

[2] Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. eds. (2017) Group Privacy: new challenges of data technologies. Dordrecht: Springer.

[3] Mittelstadt, B. (2017). From Individual to Group Privacy in Big Data Analytics. Philos. Technol. 30, 475–494.

[4] See Taylor, L., Floridi, L., van der Sloot, B. eds. (2017) Group Privacy: new challenges of data technologies. Dordrecht: Springer; Tisne, M. (n.d). The Data Delusion: Protecting Individual Data Isn't Enough When The Harm is Collective. Stanford Cyber Policy Centre. https://cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/publication/data-delusion

[5] Rocher, L., Hendrickx, J.M. & de Montjoye, Y. (2019). Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models. Nat Commun 10, 3069 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-10933-3

[6] Finck, M. & Pallas, F. (2020). They who must not be identified—distinguishing personal from non-personal data under the GDPR. International Data Privacy Law, 10 (1), 11–36. https://doi.org/10.1093/idpl/ipz026

[7] European Commission (2020). Communication From The Commission To The European Parliament, The Council, The European Economic And Social Committee And The Committee Of The Regions: A European strategy for data. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1593073685620&uri=CELEX:52020DC0066

[8] Modrall, Jay. (2019). Antitrust risks and Big Data. Norton Rose Fullbright. https://www.nortonrosefulbright.com/en-in/knowledge/publications/64c13505/antitrust-risks-and-big-data

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/inputs-to-report-on-non-personal-data-governance-framework

Informational Privacy in India: An Emerging Discourse

Admin — 2018-12-01T05:40:31Z

Centre for Policy Research supported by Omidyar Network organized this event in New Delhi on November 29, 2018. Amber Sinha was a speaker on the first panel on privacy and its tradeoffs.

Concept Note

The last few years have seen a formalisation of the right to informational privacy within India’s constitutional framework. While the context to this – the challenge to the validity of the Aadhaar project – has entailed broader issues on delivery of public goods and services, the response to whether an individual can assert control over key informational aspects of her life has become a critical part of our rights jurisprudence.

The Supreme Court verdict in Justice Puttaswamy’s case (2017) unequivocally affirmed this right despite leaving open several important aspects including the permissibility of restrictions on this right, and the level of scrutiny which the judiciary could exercise to safeguard them. What was particularly striking was the judicial reliance on considerable scholarship emerging from India and Indian scholars on important themes pertaining to this right: the differing conceptions of privacy and the role for each of them within India’s constitutional framework; the impact of privacy erosion on citizen-State relationship and private transactions in the commercial realm; surveillance tools and technologies in India; the need for an indigenous data protection law, and much more. The court has picked up on this thread in the second Puttaswamy verdict upholding the constitutional validity of Aadhaar with some important caveats and exceptions.

Recently, the Expert Committee headed by retired Justice Srikrishna also convened to come out with a draft personal data protection bill. The centrality of data to both commercial activity and governance purposes has found recognition in this bill. While the present legal regime to regulate data in India can be considered chequered at best with divergent regulations across finance, healthcare, telecom, mobility etc., the new bill aims to create a “big data-ready” framework. It impacts any private enterprise handling personal data by stipulating new internal procedures and strong penalties. The major themes in the bill are new user rights for data principals (individuals) who share their data with data fiduciaries (technology companies); data localisation and crossborder data flows; data protection authority (DPA) and its powers; data fiduciaries and new compliance requirements; and exceptions including law enforcement. Each of these carries major implications for data-driven solutions.

During the deliberations of the Committee too, substantial Indian scholarship on the themes listed above have been referenced and relied upon. This is truly a breakout moment for privacy and data protection in India. It is changing the terrain of institutional responses to personal data, technology architectures, and digital trade.

Discussion Objectives and Format

With the above background, the Centre for Policy Research conducted a closed-door, invite only discussion on November 29, 2018 on the theme Informational Privacy in India: An Emerging Discourse. This discussion sought to engage with representatives from embassies, chambers of commerce and research funding organisations located in India. It took place from 10.00 to 13.00 hours at the Taj Vivanta Ambassador, Sujan Singh Park off Subramaniam Bharti Marg, New Delhi 110003.

The core objectives driving this workshop were to:

Highlight informational privacy debates in India;
Locate informational privacy within India’s constitutional setting, closely re-examining the Supreme Court verdicts in this regard;
Explore themes such as the notice-and-consent framework, regulatory interventions and structural changes, and other key themes on privacy and data protection in India;
Demystify concepts introduced to strengthen personal data protection, including actor and data categories, and new user rights, and their potential impact on technology design;
Highlight the ramifications of data localization and cross-border data transfer restrictions, on digital trade and e-commerce;
Decode the new structural mechanisms proposed to mitigate risks in collection, storage, and processing of personal data;
Identify the impact of these mechanisms on the functioning of data-driven businesses and the future of data innovation in India.

Click to view the agenda

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/informational-privacy-in-india-an-emerging-discourse

Information Influx Conference

praskrishna — 2014-07-28T06:31:40Z

Malavika Jayaram was a speaker at the event organized by the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam from July 2 to 4, 2014.

Click to read the full details here.

When IViR set up its research 25 years ago, the digital transition was just starting to gather speed. Since then, our societies have been undergoing enormous changes in the modes of expression, organization and (re)use of information. Traditional roles of producers, intermediaries, users and governments blur and are recast. Information is the central building block of market economies. New ways of creating, disseminating and using it impact the workings of democracy, of science and education, creativity and culture.

Information Influx will bridge disciplines, regions and institutional perspectives to confront the major challenges of developing the rules that govern the expression, organization and re(use) of information in our society – as the central aspects of IViR’s Research Programme.

Wednesday 2 July

13.00 – 16.30

Information Influx Young Scholars Competition:

13.00 – 15.00

Welcome by Prof. Mireille van Eechoud & Dr. L. Guibault

Catherine Doldirina (Joint Research Centre EC) – Open data and Earth observations: the case of opening access to and use of EO through the Global Earth Observation System of Systems
Comments by Prof. Mark Perry

Jenny Metzdorf (University of Luxembourg) – The implementation of the Audiovisual Media Services Directive by national regulatory authorities – National reponses to regulatory challenges
Comments by Dr. Tarlach McGonagle

Harry Halpin (MIT/W3C) – No Safe Haven: The Storage of Data Secrets
Comments by Dr. Philippe Aigrain

15.00 – 15.15
Refreshments break

15.15 – 16.30

Ellen Wauters (ICRI – University of Leuven) – Social Networking Sites’ Terms of Use: addressing imbalances in the user-provider relationship through ex ante and ex post mechanisms
Comments by Dr. Chantal Mak

Nicolo Zingales (Tilburg University) – Virtues and perils of anonymity: should intermediaries bear the burden?
Comments by Prof. Joel Reidenberg

Closing remarks

17.00 – 18.30

Information Influx public opening:

Welcome Louise Gunning-Schepers (University of Amsterdam), Edgar du Perron (University of Amsterdam) and Bernt Hugenholtz (Institute for Information Law)
Keynote – Degrees of Freedom: Sketches of a political theory for an age of deep uncertainty and persistent imperfection – prof. Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law School)
Young Scholars Award ceremony
Speech by Neelie Kroes (Vice-President of the European Commission) – Our Single Market is Crying out for Copyright Reform!

19.00 – 22.00

IViR 25th birthday soirée – by invitation

Thursday 3 July

9.00 – 10.00

Keynote – Governance, Function and Form – prof. Deirdre Mulligan (University of California, Berkeley)

As data and technology to wield it become pervasive, privacy protection must take new forms. Traditional models of governance centered on state actors, and human oversight do not scale to today’s challenges. Drawing from several research projects Mulligan suggests that focusing on roles and functions, rather than traditional forms and actors, can assist us in leveraging the potential of a range of human and technical actors towards privacy’s protection.

10.30 – 12.30

Parallel sessions:

12.30 – 13.45

Lunch

13.45 – 14.30

Julian Oliver & Danja Vasiliev

14.30 – 16.30

Parallel sessions:

17.00 – 18.00

Keynote – Copyright as Innovation Policy – Fred von Lohmann (Google)

Copyright has historically been concerned with encouraging commercial cultural production. Thanks to digital technology, however, copyright law today finds itself called upon to take on additional unfamiliar roles, including fostering technological innovation and encouraging amateur creative expression. The talk will suggest some ways that copyright can successfully grow into these new roles.

19.00 – 22.00

Conference Dinner

Friday 4 July

9.00 – 10.00

Keynote – Datafication, dataism and dataveillance – prof. José van Dijck (University of Amsterdam)

The popularization of datafication as a neutral paradigm is carried by a widespread belief and supported by institutional guardians of trust. That notion of trust becomes problematic when it leads to dataveillance by a number of institutions that handle people’s (meta)data. The interlocking of government, business, and academia in the adaptation of this ideology (“dataism”) prompts us to look more critically at the entire ecosystem of connective media.

10.30 – 12.30
Parallel sessions:

12.30 – 14.00

Buffet Lunch, plus: Brown bag lunch with Rob Frieden – Net Neutrality: One step beyond

14.00 – 15.00

Keynote – Intellectual Property: Two Pasts and A Future – prof. James Boyle (Duke Law School)

Twenty years from now, will our children look up from their digital devices and ask “Daddy, did anyone ever own a book”? In his keynote speech, James Boyle will trace the past lives of intellectual property, the battles fought, the technologies regulated. Can we find hints of the future in the battles of our past? Boyle’s answer is yes, and that answer should give us pause.

15.30 – 17.30

Parallel sessions:

17.30 – 18.30

Farewell drinks

Parallel sessions

Rights in the mix

Among amateur and professional creators alike there is a manifest need to not only share but also remix existing works. The panel discusses how adequately open content licensing systems support these needs. It also looks to how well this licensing system fits in the wider legal framework.

prof. Séverine Dusollier (University of Namur) (moderator)
Paul Keller (Kennisland)
prof. Daniel Gervais (Vanderbilt Law School)
prof. Volker Grassmuck (Lüneburg University)

Behavioural targeting – If you cannot control it, ban it?

The discussion about the potential pitfalls of behavioural targeting practices and the problems it may create for users and user rights continues in full force. The growing evidence of the ineffectiveness of the existing informed-consent-approach to regulation can no longer be ignored. Is it time for the regulator to move to more drastic means and ban certain behavioural targeting practices, and if so, which practices?

prof. Chris Hoofnagle (University of California, Berkeley) (moderator)
prof. Neil Richards (Washington University)
Frederik Borgesius (Institute for Information Law)
prof. Joseph Turow (University of Pennsylvania)
prof. Mireille Hildebrandt (University of Nijmegen)
dr. Tal Zarsky (University of Haifa)

Tomorrow’s news: bright, mutualized and open?

As public debate becomes more diversified, crowded, interactive, noisy and technology-dependent than ever before, what survival strategies are being devised for the news as we know it? Are existing expressive and communicative rights, and related duties and responsibilities, fit-for-purpose in increasingly digitized and networked democratic societies? Will tomorrow’s news still be worth tuning into?

dr. Tarlach McGonagle (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
dr. Susanne Nikoltchev (European Audiovisual Observatory)
Aidan White (Ethical Journalism Network)
dr. Luís Santos (University of Minho)
dr. Eugenia Siapera (Dublin City University)
Gillian Phillips (The Guardian)

Filtering away infringement: copyright, injunctions and the role of ISPs

Can technology solve the problem of intermediary liability for online copyright infringement? If so, should technology be allowed to determine law? This panel shall focus on the issue of injunctions imposed on online intermediaries to force them to adopt measures that filter or block copyright infringements by third parties on their websites.

prof. Bernt Hugenholtz (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
prof. Dirk Visser (University of Leiden)
Remy Chavannes (Brinkhof)
Fred von Lohmann (Google)
Sir Richard Arnold (High Court UK)
prof. Niva Elkin-Koren (University of Haifa)
prof. Reto Hilty (Max Planck Institute)

Mass-digitization and the conundrum of online access

Cultural heritage institutions face difficulties providing online access to digitized materials in their collections. This session examines a number of pressing issues, taking a trans-Atlantic perspective. When does digitization in public-private partnerships pose a threat to access to public domain materials? What ways are there to manage rights clearance of copyrighted materials and deal with territoriality?

prof. Martin Senftleben (VU University Amsterdam) (moderator)
prof. Pamela Samuelson (University of California, Berkeley)
dr. Elisabeth Niggemann (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)
prof. Martin Kretschmer (Glasgow University)

The algorithmic public: towards a normative framework for automated media

In the online media, decisions about what users get to see (or not to see) are increasingly automated, through the use of smart algorithms and extensive data about users’ preferences and online behaviour. This raises a number of fundamental questions about freedom of expression, editorial integrity and user autonomy. Leading thinkers will debate algorithmic decision-making in online media and explore the contours of a much needed normative framework for automated media.

prof. Natali Helberger (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
dr. Joris van Hoboken (New York University)
prof. Wolfgang Schulz (Hans-Bredow-Institut)
prof. Niva Elkin-Koren (University of Haifa)
dr. Bernhard Rieder (University of Amsterdam)

Accountability and the public sector data push

Initiatives to make governments more ‘transparent’ abound. Freedom of information laws are reconfigured to push out ever more information to citizens and businesses. Promises of benefits abound too: better accountability and increased participation, as well as efficiency gains and new business opportunities. Can and should the next generation of freedom of information laws serve both political-democratic objectives and economic ones?

prof. Mireille van Eechoud (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
Chris Taggart (Open Corporates)
Helen Darbishire (Access Info)
prof. Deirdre Curtin (University of Amsterdam)
dr. Ben Worthy (Birkbeck University College London)
Jonathan Gray (Open Knowledge Foundation / University of London)

A new governance model for communications security?

Today, the vulnerable state of electronic communications security dominates headlines across the globe, while money and power increasingly permeate the policy arena. 2013 has seen no less than five sweeping legislative initiatives in the E.U., while the U.S. seems to trust in the market to deliver. Amidst these diverging approaches, how should communications security be regulated?

Axel Arnbak (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
prof. Deirdre Mulligan (University of California, Berkeley)
prof. Ian Brown (Oxford University)
prof. Michel van Eeten (Delft university of technology)
Amelia Andersdotter (European Parliament)
Ashkan Soltani (independent researcher)

Global information flows and the nation state

Information flows contest the physical spaces in which the nation state has been deemed a sovereign for almost five centuries. This tension dominates nearly all areas of information law, from data protection and IP enforcement to mass surveillance by national intelligence agencies. This session reflects on the broader challenges that territoriality presents for information law today.

prof. Urs Gasser (Harvard) (moderator)
prof. Joel Reidenberg (Fordham Law School)
prof. Graeme Dinwoodie (Oxford University)
Malavika Jayaram (Harvard)
Hielke Hijmans (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)

United in diversity – the future of the public mission

Digital technologies and the information economy create fascinating new opportunities but also pose fundamental challenges to the fulfilment of the public mission of the media, public archives and libraries alike. This panel is a step towards establishing a dialogue between the three institutions: to explore the congruence between their missions, and their responses to critical issues such as technological convergence, the changing habits of users, the growing abundance of content and their relationship to new information intermediaries, such as search engines, social networks or content platforms.

prof. Natali Helberger (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
prof. Klaus Schönbach (University of Vienna)
prof. Frank Huysmans (University of Amsterdam)
prof. Egbert Dommering (Institute for Information Law)
Maarten Brinkerink (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision)
Richard Burnley (European Broadcasting Union)

Legalizing file-sharing: an idea whose time has come – or gone?

Alternative compensation systems are designed to legalize and monetize online copyright restricted acts of distributing and consuming content. Empirical evidence shows that end-users strongly support paying flat-rate fees for the ability to legally download and share content. So what prevents us from introducing such schemes? The group of experts convened debates the future of alternative compensation systems in light of current legal, business and technology trends.

prof. Bernt Hugenholtz (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
prof. Neil Netanel (University of California, Los Angeles)
prof. Alexander Peukert (University of Frankfurt)
dr. Philippe Aigrain (Quadrature du Net)
prof. Séverine Dusollier (University of Namur)

Assembly (Information influx)

Taking legal cases and controversies involving intellectual property, art collective Agency composes a growing list of “Things” that resist the split between “nature” and “culture”, a split that intellectual property relies upon. From the list of over a 1,000 Things, Agency calls forth Thing 002094, the copyright controversy Être et Avoir, to jointly speculate upon. The purpose is less to re-enact the judgment and more to prolong hesitation.

Agency
Severine Dusollier
Wilco Kalff
Sanne Rovers
Margot van de Linde
Arnisa Zeqo

Big brother is back

The debate about the pervasive surveillance of the online environment is roaring. Considering what we know now, what better metaphor is there than to conclude that we live in the world of Big Brother? This session will bring together leading thinkers and doers related to power and control in the communication environment, who will provide critical input on the way we think and speak about information freedom and control. Should we aspire to tame Big Brother or should we think differently about the problem?

Axel Arnbak (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
dr. Joris van Hoboken (New York University) (moderator)
John McGrath (National Theatre of Wales)
dr. Seda Gürses (New York University)
Hans de Zwart (Bits of Freedom)

Who owns the World Cup? The case for and against property rights in sports events

Sports have important economic, social and cultural dimensions. What is the optimal form of legal protection of sports events considering the public-private nature of sports? The focus of debate will be on football because of its major relevance in Europe in terms of diffusion, commercial exploitation, and social impact; but we can expect many insights to hold true for other sports as well.

prof. Bernt Hugenholtz (Institute for Information Law) (moderator)
prof. Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge)
prof. Dirk Voorhoof (Ghent University)
prof. Peter Jaszi (American University Washington)
prof. Graeme Dinwoodie (Oxford University)
prof. Egbert Dommering (Institute for Information Law)
prof. Alan Bairner (Loughborough University)

Associated events

Invitation only:
Wednesday 2 July: Big Breakfast with Joseph Turow & Tal Zarksy – Ethical, normative, social and cultural implications of profiling & targeting in an era of big data – towards a research agenda, Institute for Information Law (IViR) & Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR), East India House, room E0.02, 09.00-12.00 a.m.

Public event:

Friday 4 July: Lecture James Boyle & Marjan Hammersma about cultural heritage and the public domain
More information and registration at:
Cultural heritage institutions as guardians of public domain works in the digital environment, Rijksmuseum & Kennisland in cooperation with IViR, Rijksmuseum Auditorium, 18.00-20.00 p.m.

About IViR

The Institute for Information Law (IViR) is a centre of excellence in academic research which consistently seeks to further our understanding of how legal norms reflect and shape the creation, dissemination and use of information in our societies. That is the ambition at the heart of the many research initiatives IVIR has undertaken since its foundation in 1989. The urgency of taking an interdisciplinary and international approach has only grown in the past decades. It is crucial if we want to understand and evaluate the rapidly evolving complex and myriad legal norms that govern information relations in markets, in social and in political spaces. With over 30 researchers, teachers and support staff based in our offices in the historic centre of Amsterdam, we have the critical mass to broach key regulatory challenges of today’s information society.

Our focus on information relations deliberately cuts across traditional boundaries in legal scholarship. We bring together insights from constitutional law, human rights, public administration, intellectual property, contract and property law, and competition law. Our functional approach enables fruitful collaboration with experts from an array of academic disciplines, in information and communications technology, economics, media studies, political science and the arts.

Continuing a long Dutch tradition of openness towards the world, our work has a strong international orientation. It shows in the topics we study, the strong global network of affiliations we have in academia and the wonderful dynamic mix of upcoming and experienced researchers from all over Europe and beyond that make up IViR.

With each consecutive research programme we prioritize legal developments that fascinate us, and translate them into a variety of research projects. This includes doctoral research, research for policymakers at national, European and international level, and projects funded through national and European research grant programmes. Our current research programme and an overview of research projects can be found here. Doctoral dissertations, journal articles, books, case comments, studies, reports, lectures, debates, workshops, conferences and summer schools are the staple means of communicating what we do. Browse our publications here.

Media reports and conference outputs will be posted on the IViR website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/information-influx-conference

Infographic: The Impending Right to Privacy Judgment

Amber Sinha and Pooja Saxena — 2017-08-22T23:50:44Z

The ruling will be important not just for the immediate Aadhaar case but also numerous other matters to do with state intrusions, decisional autonomy and informational privacy.

The article was published in the Wire on August 17, 2017.

Over the last month, a nine-judge constitutional bench of the Supreme Court has heard arguments on the existence of a fundamental right to privacy in India. Media coverage of judicial hearings in the apex court is often ripe with inaccuracies, thanks in no small measure to the court’s own restrictive policies, which, for instance, prevent video recordings. In this case, the arguments – which were heard over the course of three weeks – were widely reported in much greater detail and with fidelity, thanks largely to the live tweets by Gautam Bhatia and Prasanna S. (the entire collection of tweets is available here).

The availability of the entire set of written arguments made available by LiveLaw was another rich source for anyone following this matter in detail. The ruling by the bench will be of extreme importance not just for the immediate Aadhaar case, which has witnessed gross delays, but also numerous other matters in the future to do with state intrusions, decisional autonomy and informational privacy.

The questions before this bench are two fold – do the judgments in M.P. Sharma and Others vs Satish Chandra (decided by an eight-judge bench in 1954) and Kharak Singh vs State of UP and Others (decided by a six-judge bench in 1962) lead to the conclusion that there is no fundamental right to privacy, and whether the decisions in the later cases upholding a right to privacy were correct.

This infographic tries to unpack the hearings in the court into distinct issues, and the key arguments advanced by both the sides on them. The arguments from both sides on a particular question have been presented side by side for better appreciation, even though they were not argued together

Given the nature of the exercise, some of the arguments made in the infographic are bound to be a simplification of the actual issue. But it is hoped that this will provide a good overview of the issues argued.

Research and writing by Amber Sinha. Design by Pooja Saxena. Amber Sinha is a lawyer and works at the Centre for Internet and Society. Pooja Saxena is a typeface and graphic designer, specialising in Indic scripts.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-wire-amber-sinha-and-pooja-saxena-august-17-2017-infographic-the-impending-right-to-privacy-judgment

Industry Consultation Panel on Data Retention - DSCI

praskrishna — 2016-12-06T15:55:14Z

Udbhav Tiwari was a panelist for an Industry Consultation Panel on Data Retention organised by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) at the Le Meridian, New Delhi on 23 November 2016.

The agenda for the Panel was ‘Data Retention – Provisions under 67C’ and Udbhav's co-panellists were:

Gowree Gokhale, Nishith Desai and Associates
Srinivas Poosarla, Vice President and Head (Global), Privacy & Data Protection, Infosys
Chandra Ballabh, Security & Continuity Group, Bharti Airtel

The Panel was moderated by Bishakha Bhattacharya, Senior Director, NASSCOM.

The panel was fairly interesting and I largely espoused an outlook based on the principles of Transparency, Accountability, Proportionality and Due Process for any regulation that does come out in the near future regarding data retention, with a particular focus on balancing the interests of the key stakeholders. (Government, Industry & the Public)

The feedback to our position on the panel was decent to good, with Microsoft, Intel-McAfee, Samsung and SAP reaching out and agreeing to our broader stand and some of them looking forward to collaborating on us on future work on the topic as well.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/industry-consultation-panel-on-data-retention-dsci

Indian public concerned about fingerprint payment scheme

praskrishna — 2017-02-12T15:10:23Z

The Guardian is reporting that a prominent think tank has found that the prospect of using fingerprint authentication for everyday payments is raising privacy concerns among the Indian public.

The blog post by Rawlson King was published by Biometric Update.com on February 9, 2017. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was quoted.

The Centre for Internet and Society says that many Indians are concerned about the “privacy implications” of using Aadhaar as a payment scheme.

Aadhaar is the 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every individual resident of India. The Aadhaar project aims to provide a single, unique identifier which captures all the demographic and biometric details of every Indian resident. Currently, Aadhaar has issued over 900 million Aadhaar numbers. BiometricUpdate.com recently reported that over one billion people have now been enrolled.

The Indian government is intent on expanding the use of Aadhaar beyond the provision of social services to include financial transactions. The government’s “Digital India” initiative aims to create a “cradle-to-grave digital identity” that can enable a digital economy. Moving towards a digital economy will allow low income people to access the banking system. The use of Aadhaar for most transactions however would also allow the government to reduce the cash supply, which would work to eliminate untaxed cash transactions.

The government took a big step towards reducing the cash supply last November by removing 500 and 1,000 rupee notes, thereby eliminating 85 percent of the country’s circulating currency. Indian residents responded by setting up three million, enabled by fingerprint verification. BiometricUpdate.com has reported that banks, including DCB Bank, have introduced Aadhaar enhanced services, and that financial service firms including YES Bank and Spice Money are introducing Aadhaar-enabled payment systems.

The unveiling of this biometric-based payment ecosystem however is creating consternation among the general public. Sumandro Chattapadhyay, a director at the Centre for Internet and Society told the Guardian that Indian residents are concerned about the “data-sharing possibilities opened up by Aadhaar.”

He noted that Aadhaar “makes it easier for companies not only to share information on individuals’ consumption and mobility habits, but also to link this data up with public records like the electoral register. Both lead to significant threats to privacy of individuals.”

Chattapadhyay also told the Guardian that “the law governing use of the biometric database, fast-tracked through parliament last year, is flimsy when it comes to the private sector. Since India lacks a general privacy or data protection law, this leaves corporate use of Aadhaar services effectively unregulated.”

He told the UK newspaper that his greatest fear is that “private companies could eventually gain access to government-held personal data, such as income or medical records, while the government could use company data like phone records to target specific individuals in political campaigns.”

Despite these fears, the government continues to move ahead with link Aadhaar with more elements of the financial system. Recent reports have stated that the Indian government may allow citizens to use Aadhaar to file their income tax returns.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/biometric-update-february-9-2017-rawlson-king-indian-public-concerned-about-fingerprint-payment-scheme

Indian IT firms not ready for European Union's proposed privacy laws, only a few compliant with GDPR

Admin — 2018-04-18T00:56:20Z

Only a third of Indian IT firms are compliant with the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into force on 25 May, according to a media report.

The article was published in First Post on March 26, 2018.

The GDPR, the EU's new online privacy rules, is designed to protect users' online privacy. The European Parliament has adopted the regulation but European governments have yet to approve the text.

“Only 30-35 percent of all IT/ITeS companies have started their journey to work towards GDPR compliance,” Jaspreet Singh, Cyber Security Partner at EY, was quoted as saying by The Economic Times.

The GDPR is applicable to companies globally, and has significant potential financial penalties. Damages of any breach of privacy of user data from Europe could cost companies as much as four percent of their revenue, according to The Economic Times. For the Indian IT sector, Europe ranks number two in terms of the amount of business it drives, with US still taking the lead.

Indian firms, according to Business Standard, are struggling to understand the GDPR policies. A survey by EY had shown that 60 percent of Indian respondents were unfamiliar with the new regulation.

"When asked to describe their company’s current status with respect to complying with the GDPR, only 33 percent of respondents said that they have a plan, while 39 percent said that they are not familiar with the GDPR at all and 17 percent said that they have heard of the GDPR but have not yet taken any action," EY’s Global Forensic Data Analytics Survey 2018 had said.

What the GDPR is all about?

The GDPR attempts to unify data protection laws across the EU. It applies to all companies, regardless of location, that process the personal data of people living in the European Union. It aims to strengthen the protection of EU citizens' personal details. It will apply to all companies, including those outside of the EU.

The GDPR is considered the biggest shake-up of personal data privacy rules since the birth of the internet. It is intended to give European citizens more control over their online information.

Under the new regulation, users will be asked once and for all whether to accept cookies, rather than every time they visit a new website. Users will have the option of going invisible online, while the rules enshrine the so-called "right to be forgotten" legislation. The industries most deeply affected will be those that collect large amounts of customer data and include technology companies, retailers, healthcare providers, insurers and banks.

Companies must be able to provide European customers with a copy of their personal data and under some circumstances delete it at their behest. They will also be required to report data breaches within 72 hours.

How Indian firms will be affected?

According to a study published by The Centre for Internet and Society, as a result of GDPR, data protection procedures like breach notification; excessive documentation and appointment of data protection officer may have to be incorporated in the Indian laws as well.

"As non – compliance involves high fines, inability of India or the organizations situated in India to qualify as data secure destinations is likely to divert business opportunities to safer locations," the study said.

(With inputs from agencies)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/first-post-march-26-2018-indian-it-firms-not-ready-for-european-unions-proposed-privacy-laws-only-a-few-compliant-with-gdpr

Indian Intermediary Liability Regime: Compliance with the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability

divij — 2018-05-20T15:14:21Z

This report assesses the compliance of the Indian intermediary liability framework with the Manila Principles on Intermediary Liability, and recommends substantive legislative changes to bring the legal framework in line with the Manila Principles.

The report was edited by Elonnai Hickok and Swaraj Barooah

The report is an examination of Indian laws based upon the background paper to the Manila Principles as the explanatory text on which these recommendations have been based, and not an assessment of the principles themselves. To do this, the report considers the Indian regime in the context of each of the principles defined in the Manila Principles. As such, the explanatory text to the Manila Principles recognizes that diverse national and political scenario may require different intermediary liability legal regimes, however, this paper relies only on the best practices prescribed under the Manila Principles.

The report is divided into the following sections

Principle I: Intermediaries should be shielded by law from liability for third-party content
Principle II: Content must not be required to be restricted without an order by a judicial authority
Principle III: Requests for restrictions of content must be clear, be unambiguous, and follow due process
Principle IV: Laws and content restriction orders and practices must comply with the tests of necessity and proportionality
Principle V: Laws and content restriction policies and practices must respect due process
Principle VI: Transparency and accountability must be built into laws and content restriction policies and practices
Conclusion

Download the Full report here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-intermediary-liability-regime

Indian ID crisis unveils Aadhaar doubts

praskrishna — 2013-03-15T04:52:49Z

Two separate organizations are capturing biometric data of over 1 billion Indians, creating fresh doubts in the government's justification to catalogue citizens.

The blog post by Mahesh Sharma was published in ZD Net on March 14, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

A new US$1 billion national identity card project has undermined the Indian government's ambitious "Aadhaar" project to catalogue the biometric details of over 1 billion citizens.

Indians' biometric details are being captured by two separate organizations: the National Population Register, to develop the resident identity card (RIC); and the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), to create a unique identifier (UID), commonly referred to as "Aadhaar" number.

Both projects are designed to streamline the distribution of welfare and social services to citizens--a process that is currently mired in corruption.

In an interview with ZDNet, Centre for Internet and Society's India executive director, Sunil Abraham, said the ID smartcard and ID number are fundamentally different, not complementary, as the government has previously said.

"Those are two very separate visions. You cannot mix them up and make some kind of salad and have a little bit of this and a little bit of that. You have to go the whole hog in one direction," Abraham said.

He said it was easier for the government to proceed with both projects, rather than cancel Aadhaar, which has been criticized over reports there were duplicate biometric information and data abuse.

"The government is afraid it made a mistake," Abraham said. "It could just continue to create a hodgepodge of both ideas, both visions, and continue making big mistakes and have ghosts [in the UID system] and large scale corruption."

On March 12, India's house of representatives, the Lok Sabha, Member of Parliament, P. Karunakaran asked the Minister of State, R.P.N. Singh, to clarify the overlap between the proposed biometric identity card and UID. Singh confirmed the government would spend over US$1 billion (55.52 billion rupees) to issue a resident identity card (RIC) that featured the Aadhaar number.

"The RIC would enable both online and offline authentication of identity in a secure manner and will complement the efforts of Aadhaar," Singh said in a written response. To avoid duplication, he explained that if citizen biometric data was already captured by the UIDAI, then the Aadhaar number would be recorded on the RIC smart card.

Independent lawyer Usha Ramanathan told ZDNet the government had overstepped its legal bounds. She said the UIDAI has demonstrated biometrics are imperfect but the government has persisited with the project.

"The UID is lawless. Now we will have an RIC which will be lawless," Ramanathan said. "All we are offered is the UIDAI 'confidence' that the project will work."

"Privacy and personal security continue to be unprotected. And there seems to be an inexhaustible amount of money to experiment on the whole population," she noted.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/zdnet-mahesh-sharma-march-14-2013-indian-id-crisis-unveils-aadhar-doubts

Indian government websites: Gold mine for cybercriminals

praskrishna — 2014-01-31T06:18:12Z

If you are a cybercriminal trying to commit identity theft or digitally impersonate a citizen, you have help from the unlikeliest of sources — the Government of India.

The article by Srutijith KK was published in the Times of India on January 3, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Various government agencies have put vast amount of personal information online, often with little barrier to access and with hardly any provision to prevent their misuse.

Combine a few of these databases and you have a gold mine of information on India's citizens, including some of its wealthiest residents, whose bank accounts are of special interest to thieves. "If I want to target someone, I now have access to so much detail that shouldn't have been in public. Hackers with good social engineering skills will be able to call a call centre and impersonate a person. And from a stalking perspective, it has implications for not just celebrities, but anybody with a jilted lover, a political rival, and so on," said Binoo Thomas, a digital security expert at McAfee Labs.

For example, if somebody wants to get personal details of some of India's richest people, he would simply need to click on the LPG transparency links on Indane, Bharat Gas and HP portals and narrow the search to the South Mumbai region. Many gas agencies have their area of service in their names, such as Bandra Gas Agency or Colaba Gas Agency.

Select one of these gas agencies and you have a list of all the customers, with their consumer number, address and, in many cases, a mobile number. This database is also searchable by name. You can quickly search for any famous surname and be rewarded with a consumer number, residence address and in many cases, a mobile phone number.

A cursory search gave ET the mobile number and full residential address of the well-known matriarch of a famous business family. A search under the Bandra Gas Agency promptly showed the full residential address of a famous Bollywood actress. Your next stop could be the website of the Election Commission of India, which has asked all state Election Commissions to place the entire voter rolls online.

The voter roll also has the full residential address, age and gender of a person. A quick search on the MTNL Mumbai directory online will reveal the landline number for a person. With a little bit of luck and time to troll social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn, a skilled cybercriminal can discern your date of birth and professional details.

Date of birth, phone number, alternate number and billing address are the details many telephone companies and banks use to determine whether a person calling its customer helpline is indeed who she says she is. This kind of information also allows a hacker to design effective phishing attacks, which lures a person into revealing information such as passwords or credit card numbers. An email that lists accurate personal information appears authoritative and has greater likelihood of being trusted by a recipient.

Thread of identity theft
This kind of crime has been on the rise. In December, US Department of Justice estimated that $24.7 billion were lost to identity theft in 2012, as 11.5 million Americans found themselves defrauded. Similar data is unavailable for India. "Privacy has become a matter of personal security. As the state has been pushed to function in a more transparent manner, authorities are making the details about us transparent instead! The data protection principles are well evolved all over the world.

All of these data controllers are in violation of every good principle. We don't need to wait for a law to observe these principles," said Usha Ramanathan, an independent law researcher specialising in privacy, surveillance and related issues. The ministry of rural development, which administers the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, goes a step further, and places online the bank account numbers and IFSC codes for all its beneficiaries.

RTI requirements
The justification for publishing this kind of data online is typically section 4 of the RTI Act, which requires all government departments to proactively publish details of subsidy programmes, including details of the subsidy availed. However, section 8(1) of the same Act says that personal information that invades privacy of an individual need not be published unless an appellate authority decides that a larger public interest is served by it. It's unclear what public interest is served by the publication of full residential address, mobile number or bank accounts by various agencies.

In some cases, like the MNREGS and the voter rolls, sector-specific laws also apply. "Going by the provisions of the MGNREGA, which mandates proactive disclosures, we keep all processes in the public view... We have not perceived any threat in displaying bank account numbers of wage seekers, most of which have been opened for receiving wages," said R Subrahmanyam, the joint secretary at the ministry of rural development who heads the MNREGA division.

The petroleum ministry did not respond to an email requesting comment. In an emailed response, Chief Election Commissioner VS Sampath referred to Rule 33 of the Registration of Elector Rules, 1960, to establish that the voter roll was a public document. "Thus it can be seen that Electoral Roll is a public document which is available to the public for inspection. The Commission has, therefore, given instructions to put this public document on the website to facilitate inspection by public. When law stipulates that it is a public document, the public has a right to access it," he said. But no law states that anonymising techniques or relevant barriers to accessing private information should not be deployed.

Legal vacuum
India does not have an omnibus privacy law that overrides sector specific legislation. According to Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore-based thinktank Centre for Internet and Society, there are some 50 different laws that have a privacy element in India. The Department of Personnel and Training has been working on a draft privacy law for three years now.

"We need to think of this problem in the light of the privacy law that is being drafted. Traditionally and culturally our view of privacy has been different. A more explicit understanding of the privacy needs of the citizens is certainly welcome. Section 43A of the IT Act has provisions for data protection," said J Satyanarayana, secretary at the department of information technology.

But 43A applies only to corporations, and government agencies are not bound by it. Apart from the central government agencies, several state government agencies and schemes also collect and store personal information. But no standard protocol binds them in deciding who shall have access and who shall not.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-january-3-2014-sruthijit-kk-indian-govt-websites-gold-mine-for-cybercriminals

Indian Government says it is still drafting privacy law, but doesn’t give timelines

praskrishna — 2017-05-15T02:10:26Z

Read the original published by Medianama here

The Government is drafting a legislation to protect privacy of individuals breached through unlawful means in consultation with stakeholders, the minister for communications and information technology Ravi Shankar Prasad said in the Rajya Sabha. However, no timeline was provided, which is really the problem: Is the Indian government even interested in a privacy law?

In August last year, the Government of India had said in the Supreme Court of India that had said that “violation of privacy doesn’t mean anything because privacy is not a guaranteed right”, actually arguing that the citizens of India do not have a fundamental right to privacy.
In September last year, the DeitY had also sought to make encryption (and personal and business security) weaker via a draft policy on encryption, requiring all users to store the plaintexts of the corresponding encrypted information for 90 days from the date of transaction and provide the verifiable plain-text to Law and Enforcement Agencies if required. After a public outcry, the paper was withdrawn.
Last month, the DoT made it mandatory to have GPS on all phones by 2018.

We’re in a situation where the country doesn’t have a privacy law on one hand, and is setting up surveillance systems like the Centralized Monitoring System, NETRA, NATGRID (for collecting data from across databases), and linking citizens and databases across the unique identity number in Aadhaar on the other.

What happened to the old Privacy bill?

While India does not yet have a comprehensive privacy policy, back in 2014, the Centre for Internet and Society received a leaked version of the draft Privacy Bill 2014 that the Department of Personnel and Training, Government of India had drafted. A comparison of the draft bill from 2014 and the draft privacy bill of 2011 can be found here.

As per Prasad, as of now, the Section 43, 43A and 72A of the IT Act of 2000 provide the legal framework for digital privacy and security, mandating that agencies collecting personal data must provide a privacy policy, and compensations must be paid to the victim in case of unauthorized access or leakage of information.

Questions asked in Rajya Sabha:

Whether Government intends to bring a specific legislation to address the concerns regarding privacy in the country, if so, the details thereof, if not, the reason therefore; and

Whether the legislation would provide for protection of ‘personal data’ along the lines of the European Union’s Data Protection Directive, if so, the details thereof, if not, the reasons therefor

EU Privacy Bill

Interestingly, the question posed to the minister asked if the legislation would provide for protection of personal data along the lines of European Union’s General Data Protection Directive (GDRP), which were approved just last month. EU’s directive defines “any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identification number or to one or more factors specific to his physical, physiological, mental, economic, cultural or social identity”, as personal data.

The GDRP has a pretty wide scope and is pretty consumer friendly. The laws require users to provide explicit consent for data collection, companies to report as soon as they have a data breach, and a ‘right to erasure’ that lets users request all personal data related to them to be deleted. It also imposes a significant fine of up to 4% of annual worldwide turnover of a company in the previous financial year, in case of non compliance. For a comprehensive overview of the policy read handbook on European data protection law (pdf).

Email privacy bill US

The US does not have a comprehensive digital privacy law like the EU and mostly relies on the the privacy act of 1974. However, recently the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the Email Privacy Act that would require investigators to get a warrant before forcing companies to hand over customer email or other electronic communications, no matter how old the communication.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/medianama-vivek-pai-may-4-2017-indian-govt-says-it-is-still-drafting-privacy-law

Indian Government Quietly Brings In Its 'Central Monitoring System': Total Surveillance Of All Telecommunications

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T09:12:49Z

There's a worrying trend around the world for governments to extend online surveillance capabilities to encompass all citizens -- often justified with the usual excuse of combatting terrorism and/or child pornography.

The blog post was published in tech dirt on June 8, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

The latest to join this unhappy club is India, which has put in place what sounds like a massively intrusive system, as this article from The Times of India makes clear:

The government last month quietly began rolling out a project that gives it access to everything that happens over India's telecommunications network -- online activities, phone calls, text messages and even social media conversations. Called the Central Monitoring System, it will be the single window from where government arms such as the National Investigation Agency or the tax authorities will be able to monitor every byte of communication.

This project has been under development for two years, but in almost total secrecy:

"In the absence of a strong privacy law that promotes transparency about surveillance and thus allows us to judge the utility of the surveillance, this kind of development is very worrisome," warned Pranesh Prakash, director of policy at the Centre for Internet and Society. "Further, this has been done with neither public nor parliamentary dialogue, making the government unaccountable to its citizens."

That combination of total surveillance and zero transparency is a dangerous one, providing the perfect tool for monitoring and controlling political and social dissent. If India wishes to maintain its claim to be "the world's largest democracy", its government would do well to introduce some safeguards against abuse of the new system, such as strong privacy laws, as well as engaging the Indian public in an open debate about what exactly such extraordinary surveillance powers might be used for.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/tech-dirt-june-8-2013-indian-govt-quietly-brings-central-monitoring-system

Indian Cricket Board Exposes Personal Data of Thousands of Players

Admin — 2018-05-18T05:01:50Z

The IT security researchers at Kromtech Security Center discovered a trove of personal and sensitive data belonging to around 15,000 to 20,000 Indian applicants participating in cricket seasons 2015-2018.

The blog post was published on Hack Read on May 15, 2018.

The authority responsible for protecting this data was The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) but it was left exposed to the public in two misconfigured AWS (Amazon Web Service) S3 cloud storage buckets.

According to the analysis from Kromtech researchers, the data was divided into different categories of players including those under 19 years old. The data was accessible to anyone with an Internet connection and basic knowledge of using AWS cloud storage.

The data was discovered earlier this month and included names, date of birth, place of birth, permanent addresses, email IDs, proficiency details, medical records, birth certificate number, passport number, SSC certificate number, PAN card number, mobile number, landline and phone number of the person who can be contacted in case of emergency.

Screenshot of one of the files that were exposed (Image credit: Kromtech)

At the time of publishing this article, the BCCI was informed by Kromtech researchers and both misconfigured buckets were secured. However, this is not the first time when such sensitive information was leaked online. In 2017, Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) found that names, addresses, date of birth, PAN card details, Aadhaar card numbers and other relevant details of millions of Indian citizen could be found with just a simple Google search.

On the other hand, lately, AWS buckets have been making headlines for the wrong reasons. Until now, there have been tons of cases in which misconfigured AWS buckets have been found carrying highly sensitive and confidential data such as classified NSA documents or details about US Military’s social media spying campaign.

In two such cases, malicious hackers were able to compromise AWS buckets belonging to Tesla Motors and LA Times to secretly mine cryptocurrency. Therefore, if you are an AWS user make sure your cloud server is properly secured.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hack-read-waqas-may-15-2018-indian-cricket-board-exposes-personal-data-of-thousands-of-players

Indian biometric ID plan faces court hurdle

praskrishna — 2013-10-03T10:58:31Z

Supreme Court in India rules -- for now -- against plan to make biometric ID mandatory for receiving services.

This article by John Ribeiro was published in Computer World on September 25, 2013. Pranesh Prakash is quoted.

A controversial biometric project in India, which could require people to produce their biometric IDs to collect government subsidies, has received a significant setback from the country's Supreme Court.

The court ruled this week in an interim order that people cannot be required to have the controversial Aadhaar identification to collect state subsidies, even as the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), the government agency that manages the project, has been trying to promote the Aadhaar number as proof of identity for a variety of services including banking.

The UIDAI has said that the scheme is voluntary, but some states and agencies have attempted to link the identification to the implementation of programs such as cash subsidies for cooking gas that benefit even the middle and richer classes.

"I signed up for Aadhaar only to ensure that I continue to get a gas cylinder at reasonable rates," said an executive in Bangalore who had queued up a few months ago for an Aadhaar number. The state of Maharashtra, for example, aims to be the first state in the country to roll out Aadhaar-linked subsidy transfers to LPG (liquified petroleum gas) consumers across all the districts in the state.

Pending a final order, the court ruled that "....no person should suffer for not getting the Adhaar card inspite of the fact that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory...."

UIDAI Chairman Nandan Nilekani did not immediately agree to discuss the court order.

The Aadhaar project is the result of an executive order, and is not backed by a law passed by India's Parliament, so its legality can be in question, said Pavan Duggal, a cyberlaw expert who practices before India's Supreme Court. The project could be in violation of the country's Information Technology Act and rules which cover collection, handling and processing of sensitive personal data, he added.

Aadhaar, though said to be voluntary, could also be in violation of fundamental rights of the Indian constitution relating to right to life and privacy, as a perception is being created that the ID will be required for subsidies and benefits, Duggal added.

The government should have considered getting an enabling law passed by Parliament for the data collection as also a strong privacy law to prevent misuse of Aadhaar related data and collation of multiple databases using Aadhaar, because of the privacy issues involved and its implications on fundamental rights, said Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

The biometric project, which collects 10 fingerprints, iris scan and other information such as name, date of birth and address, has been criticized by a number of privacy groups who worry that the data could at some point be misused by the government. There is also a risk that such large databases could be hacked, putting at risk information of people. It is not clear what are the measures taken by UIDAI to protect the authenticity and correctness of the biometric information, and prevent access by foreign powers, Duggal said.

The Aadhaar number now allows different agencies including private organizations to collect and exchange data between them, which may be useful to marketers, for example, Prakash said. Previously, it wasn't practical as the agencies would have difficulty ensuring that the information was about the same person, he added.

The Supreme Court has also ruled that illegal immigrants should not be enrolled under the Aadhaar program, which is meant to facilitate subsidized services to Indian citizens. The Aadhaar, which does not collect citizenship information, is likely to be misused by illegal migrants, activists have said.

One of the many challenges facing the Aadhaar program is that village-level politicians and influence peddlers cook up data to enroll under subsidy schemes people who are not eligible for benefits, or people who are nonexistent. The traditional paper ration card scheme and voter rolls are usually stuffed with nonexistent people or people who do not typically qualify for benefits.

Aadhaar was expected to remove these discrepancies by more accurate collection of data on people who enrolled under the scheme. But a number of users have complained that the Aadhaar cards they have received have errors in their names, addresses and other details. One newspaper reported that an Aadhaar applicant received a card that had the face of a dog in place of his photograph.

UIDAI aims to provide 600 million Aadhaar numbers to residents by 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/computerworld-september-25-2013-john-ribeiro-indian-biometric-id-plan-faces-court-hurdle