Centre for Internet and Society

Take-away from the I&J Project Workshop at the UN Internet Governance Forum 2015

praskrishna — 2015-11-30T14:09:57Z

The Internet & Jurisdiction Project organized the workshop “Transnational due process: A case study in multi-stakeholder cooperation” at the Internet Governance Forum convened by the United Nations on November 13, 2015.

This was published on Internet & Jurisdiction website.

The 4-day conference convened over 2000 high-level participants from states, major global Internet companies, technical Internet operators, international organizations, civil society groups and academia.

Video

The workshop organized by the I&J Project discussed how to address the tension between the cross-border nature of the Internet and a patchwork of national jurisdictions by enabling multi-stakeholder cooperation. Sunil Abraham, the Director of CIS India, stressed the limits of traditional modes of inter-state legal cooperation on the Internet:

The MLAT system is completely broken […] both from the demand side and also from the supply side.

The US Cyber Coordinator of the State Department, Christopher Painter, stated the need to streamline procedures of Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties, but also highlighted the importance of pursuing in parallel more innovative approaches, such as the Internet & Jurisdiction process:

MLATS are not always the right answer. There are other answers between law enforcement channels in terms of joint investigations and there are also creative solutions that might take some of the burden off that MLAT process and I think that those are worthy of exploration.

Representing the Canadian ccTLD .ca, Mark Bull reflected upon how to develop such solutions to maintain the global nature of the Internet.

We are talking about incredibly complex issues here and I believe that complexity necessitates a multi-stakeholder process to identify solutions. And that is what I think the beauty of the Internet & Jurisdiction Project is. And it’s why because of the multi-stakeholder structure, that’s why we believe it is the best and the most effective form for discussing issues this complex.

Panelist Eileen Donahoe, the Director of Global Affairs at Human Rights Watch applauded the progress the Internet & Jurisdiction process made since 2012:

Let me say that the work of the I&J Project has been relentless and it is really important. This is one of the most complex spaces in Internet governance

The jurisdiction topic has become one of the most pressing Internet governance challenges, as I&J Project Director and Co-Founder Bertrand de La Chapelle pointed out:

There is a real element of urgency. The jurisdiction issue is at the core of many Internet governance problems. And it has been said in many workshops here in the IGF, but also outside of it. The problem is really getting worse. The jurisdiction problem is probably one of the biggest threats to the fabric of the Internet as we know it.

The objective of the workshop was to gather participants in the global Internet & Jurisdiction process from different stakeholder groups to report on progress and achievements. Furthermore, the workshop deepened the understanding of how to address jurisdictional tensions around the Internet and establish innovative legal cooperation mechanisms to prevent its fragmentation along national territorial boundaries.Council of Europe’s Elvana Thaci reminded participants of the importance to develop harmonized procedures across borders, as

Harmonization of substance is very difficult because the understanding of unlawfulness of content is very diverse.

Facebook’s Head of Policy Development, Matt Perault, talked about the need for appropriate procedures:

I am here because I believe the I&J Project is devoted to figuring out how to think about mechanisms for a race to the top on the issue of jurisdiction.

The pioneering Internet & Jurisdiction process has engaged more than 100 key entities around the world, creating a unique neutral space to build trust and catalyze operational solutions. As Will Hudson, Google’s Senior Advisor for International Policy, said:

We need to find solutions that work for all parties. It is one of the great strengths of the I&J Project, that it is looking at this challenge head on. We need to do things in this multi-stakeholder manner, and talk as a community because everyone has a stake in this and we cannot do this alone.

Participants

ANNE CARBLANC, Head of Division, Directorate for Science, Technology and Industry, OECD
BYRON HOLLAND, President and CEO, CIRA (Canadian ccTLD)
CHRISTOPHER PAINTER, Coordinator for Cyber Issues, US Department of State
EILEEN DONAHOE, Director Global Affairs, Human Rights Watch
EVANA THACI, Administrator, Council of Europe
MATT PERAULT, Head of Policy Development, Facebook
SUNIL ABRAHAM, Executive Director, CIS India
WILL HUDSEN, Senior Advisor for International Policy, Google

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/take-away-from-the-i-j-project-workshop-at-the-un-internet-governance-forum-2015

Wiki Rahasya: Panel Discussion on Suvarna News

praskrishna — 2013-07-02T16:36:11Z

Dr. U.B.Pavanaja participated in a panel discussion around Wikipedia in general and about Kannada Wikipedia in specific. This was telecast by Suvarna News 24x7 (Kannada) TV channel on June 13, 2013.

Videos

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/suvarna-news-june-13-2013-wiki-rahasya-panel-discussion

Digital Humanities for Indian Higher Education

Sara Morais and Subhashish Panigrahi — 2015-04-17T10:53:17Z

The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013.

Hosted by HEIRA, CSCS, Tumkur University, the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai the Center for Cultural Studies (CCS) and Access To Knowledge Programme of Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had Tejaswini Niranjana of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.

However, as Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.

This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.

In the first session of the day Amlan Dasgupta from Jadavpur University, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.

The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.

	Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and
therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Ravi Sundaram from Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Devloping Society added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and

therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.

Nishant Shah, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. The critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was about reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data produces a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. Facebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other.

Returning to scholarship, Tanveer Hasan and Sneha PP introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.

Video

In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.

It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured.

The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.

The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, Ashish Rajadhyaksha describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under Pad.ma, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?

In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as Arun Menon of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.

James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.

The last presentation of the day had Souvik Mukherjee addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that the digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online.

Summarizing the consultation, Ashwin Kumar articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.

The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education

Whose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:47:19Z

As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.

"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."

The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: dml2013.dmlhub.net.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

'Aadhaar' Of Your Existence Or Card Of Controversy?

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T12:24:20Z

recent report estimates that details of 13 crore Aadhaar card holders have been leaked from four government websites. These include bank account details, income levels, addresses, even caste and religion details.

This was telecasted by NDTV on May 3, 2017. Amber Sinha was a panelist.

As the Supreme Court questioned the government about this, the centre admitted for the first time that the leaks had taken place but passed the onus on to state governments. It also argued that no technology was a 100 per cent foolproof but that couldn't be the basis for a constitutional challenge. Those who have petitioned against making Aadhar mandatory for filing income tax say no other democratic country has such a requirement and allege that it shows the sinisterness of the government.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-may-3-2017-aadhaar-of-your-existence-or-card-of-controversy

Whose Change is it Anyway?

praskrishna — 2013-06-05T08:40:17Z

The first product from the Whose Change is it Anyway? Hague workshop with Hivos in February is out. The video captures the process of knowledge generation there.

Videos

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/whose-change-is-it-anyway

A Kannada Wikipedia Workshop at Sagara

pavanaja — 2014-03-25T08:51:36Z

On Sunday, July 28, 2013, a day-long Kannada Wikipedia workshop was conducted at Sagara, Shimoga Dist, Karnataka by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team. In this post, I share with you the happenings from the workshop.

Video

Some months ago, I got a phone call from Chinmaya M Rao from Sagara, Shimoga District requesting me to conduct a Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Sagara. He informed me that there are quite a good number of writers in that area who are interested in adding content to Kannada Wikipedia but don't know how to. Many telephonic discussions followed, many dates were considered, changed, iterated and finally the workshop was organised on Sunday, July 28, 2013. The programme was inaugurated by Shri Kagodu Thimmappa, Speaker of the current Legislative Assembly of Karnataka. Famous Kannada writer Naa D'Souza was the chief guest. Shri G.T. Shridhar Sharma, President of Kannada Times Media World, presided over the function. The programme was jointly organised by CIS and Kannada Times Media World, Sagara.

	Speaking after inaugurating the workshop, Shri Kagodu Thimmappa said "the basic knowledge of technology has become important as one could get ample, accurate information on various topics, and current affairs of the world in a minute all languages, including Kannada. It is the onus of the people of the sate to preserve and promote the use of Kannada language." (Deccan Herald, Shimaga edition, July 30, 2013). Naa D'Souza mentioned how earlier knowledge was the monopoly of some particular sections of the society and how technology has transformed knowledge into an asset of all the people irrespective of caste, race, religion, region and financial status.
Seen above is a picture of Shri Kagodu Thimmappa inagurating the workshop

I then gave a brief introduction to Wikipedia and Kannada Wikipedia. There are many encylopaedias in Kannada but very few are regularly updated. They are seldom digitised. People who add content to Kannada Wikipedia are in search of authentic information. These are available in many encylopaedias brought in by various academies, associations and universities funded by the Government of Karnataka. People of the state have a right on these content. I requested Shri Kagodu Thimmappa to bring them under the Creative Commons License so that the active Kannada Wikipedians can make use of them to add content into Kannada Wikipedia. Shri Kagodu Thimmappa promised to look into this.

After the inauguration, the actual presentation by me started at a cybercafe run by Istam Computers. It was raining heavily. Participants walked for 5 minutes in heavy rain to reach the venue. The presentation went on till lunch time. The place was very congested. One participant, B. V. Ravindranath, who is a practicing Chartered Accountant at Sagara, offered his place to conduct the hands-on workshop. Hence, all participants went to the new venue which was quite comfortable. Participants did the hands-on editing of Wikipedia till 7.30 p.m. Eleven persons participated in the workshop and edited actively. Some were seen editing Kannada Wikipedia regularly after the workshop.
Dr. U.B. Pavanaja is seen sharing a light moment with participants from the workshop in the above picture.

After the inauguration, the actual presentation by me started at a cybercafe run by Istam Computers. It was raining heavily. Participants walked for 5 minutes in heavy rain to reach the venue. The presentation went on till lunch time. The place was very congested. One participant, B. V. Ravindranath, who is a practicing Chartered Accountant at Sagara, offered his place to conduct the hands-on workshop. Hence, all participants went to the new venue which was quite comfortable. Participants did the hands-on editing of Wikipedia till 7.30 p.m. Eleven persons participated in the workshop and edited actively. Some were seen editing Kannada Wikipedia regularly after the workshop.

Dr. U.B. Pavanaja is seen sharing a light moment with participants from the workshop in the above picture.

An active Kannada Wikipedian, B S Chandrashekhar from Sagara, who has more than 4500 edits on Kannada Wikipedia to his credit was felicitated during the inauguration function. He is 79 years old. Despite his old age, he actively paticipated in the workshop till the end and learnt many intricacies which he was otherwise unaware of.

In the end, I would like to personally thank Chinmay Rao and G. T. Shridhar Sharma of Kannada Times who toiled a lot in organising the wokrshop. Also thanks to B. V. Ravindranath, CA, who provided the venue for the hands-on workshop.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/kannada-wiki-workshop-at-sagara

आधार नंबर, नाम, पता, बैंक अकाउंट और दूसरी संवेदनशील जानकारियां लीक: CIS रिपोर्ट

praskrishna — 2017-05-20T11:40:49Z

एक तरफ भारत सरकार लोगों से अपना आधार कार्ड बनवाने और उसे जरूरी सर्विसों के साथ जोड़ने की अपील कर रही है. दूसरी तरफ लगातार सरकारी वेबसाइट्स से लोगों की आधार से जुड़ी जानकारियां लीक हो रही हैं. सरकार ने आधार को लगभग सभी सर्विसों के लिए जरूरी करने की तैयारी की है.

This was published by Aaj Tak on May 4, 2017.

ताजा रिसर्च के मुताबिक सरकार के डेटाबेस से लगभग 135 मिलियन आधान नंबर ऑनलाइन लीक हुए हो सकते हैं. इस रिसर्च दी सेंटर फॉर इंटरनेट एंड सोसाइटी (CIS) ने कराया है. इस एजेंसी ने इस रिसर्च को इनफॉर्मेशन सिक्योरिटी प्रैक्टिस ऑफर आधार के नाम से प्रकाशित किया है.

रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक सरकारी पोर्टल्स ने लगभग 135 मिलियन भारतीय नागरिकों के आधार नंबर ऑनलाइन को पब्लिक कर दिया. यानी कोई भी इसे ऐक्सेस कर सके. जाहिर है ऐसे में आधार नंबर के गलत यूज का भी खतरा होता है.

चार सरकारी वेबसाइट जिनमें मनरेगा, सोशल ऐसिस्टेंस प्रोग्राम, डेली ऑनलाइन पेमेंट रिपोर्ट और चंद्रण बीमा स्कीम वेबसाइट शामिल हैं. रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक इन वेबसाइट्स पर यूजर्स के आधार नंबर और फिनांशियल जानकारी जैसे बैंक अकाउंट डीटेल को पब्लिक कर दिया जिसे कोई भी ऐक्सेस कर सकता है.

रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक नेशनल सोशल ऐसिस्टेंस प्रोग्राम की वेबसाइट पर पेंशन धारकों के जॉब कार्ड नंबर, बैंक अकाउंट नंबर, आधार कार्ड नंबर और अकाउंट की स्थिति जैसी संवेदनशील जानकारियां उपलब्ध होती हैं. लेकिन कमजोर सिक्योरिटी की वजह से यह दुनिया के किसी भी इंसान के लिए उपलब्ध हो गई. सिर्फ कुछ क्लिक से ही तमाम संवेदनशील जानकारियां हासिल की जा सकती हैं.

हाल ही में झारखंड सरकार की एक वेबसाइट पर लाखों आधार कार्ड होल्डर्स की जानकारियां लीक हो गईं. इसके अलावा कई राज्यों की सरकारी वेबसाइट पर स्कॉलरशिप पाने वाले स्टूडेंट्स के आधार कार्ड डीटेल्स लीक हो गए. गूगल सर्च के जरिए सिर्फ कुछ कीवर्ड्स यूज करके डीटेल्स कोई भी ढूंढ कर गलत यूज कर सकता है.

इस रिसर्च रिपोर्ट में कहा गया है आधार नंबर, जाती, धर्म, पता, फोटोग्राफ्स और यूजर की आर्थिक जानकारी इस तरह पब्लिक होना इस बात को दर्शाता है कि इसे कितने लचर तरीके से लागू किया गया है.

हाल ही में मानव संसाधन विकास मंत्रालय की वेबसाइट से ऐसे डेटा ऐक्सेल शीट आसानी से गूगल के जरिए डाउनलोड की जा सकती थी. आप इसे चूक करें या लापरवाही, लेकिन इतने नागरिकों का घर तक का पता किसी के पास भी हो सकता है.

क्या आधार नंबर को पब्लिक करना सही है?
आधार ऐक्ट 2016 के मुताबिक किसी नागरिक का आधार डेटा पब्लिश नहीं किया जा सकता. यानी मंत्रालय की वेबसाइट इन डेटा को सिक्योर रखने में नाकामयाब हो रही हैं.

आधार ऐक्ट 2016 के तहत कलेक्ट किया गया कोई भी आधार नंबर या कोर बायोमैट्रिक इनफॉर्मेशन पब्लिक नहीं किया जा सकता और न ही इसे किसी पब्लिक प्लैटफॉर्म पर पोस्ट किया जा सकता है. हालांकि इसके इस्तेमाल कानून के तहत शामिल की गईं एजेंसियां और संस्थाएं कर सकती हैं.

दी वायर की एक रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक एक महीने पहले डेटा रिसर्चर श्रीनीवास कोडाली ने थर्ड पार्टी वेबसाइट के द्वारा गलती लीक किए गए 5-6 लाख लोगों के पर्सनल डेटा के बारे में बताया था. इस डेटा में आधार नंबर, नाम, कास्ट, जेंडर और फोटोज शामिल थे.

सरकार के हमेशा दावा करती है कि आधार सिक्योर है
सरकार लगातार दावा करती है कि आधार सिक्योर है सेफ है और डेटा लीक नहीं हो रहे हैं. लेकिन ये घटनाएं लागातार उन दावों को खोखला साबित कर रही हैं. सवाल यह है कि अब इस रिपोर्ट के बाद सरकार कोई कठोर कदम उठाती है या फिर पहले की तरह लचर सुरक्षा बनी रहेगी.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/aaj-tak-may-4-2017-135-million-aadhaar-number-leaked-by-govt-website-cis-report

Regulating Social Media: Unrealistic, Impossible, Necessary?

praskrishna — 2013-04-30T16:50:13Z

The Press Council of India Chairperson Justice Markandey Katju calls for regulating social media, saying it will prevent offensive material coming into the public domain. But is it really necessary to regulate the social media? If yes, is it possible to do it?

This was published by NDTV on April 11, 2013.

NDTV aired a discussion by Ashwin S Kumar, Co-editor, Columnist, The Unreal Times; Kunal Majumder, Assitant Editor, Tehelka.com and Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director, Centre for Internet and Society on April 11, 2013 in response to Justice Katju's comments on bringing 'social media' under the Press Council of India.

Pranesh Prakash laid out four brief points:

'Social media' allows coffee house discussion and toilet wall scrawls to seem like print publications, but it's a mistake to treat it the same way we do print publications. The UK is now planning on using prosecutorial flexibility to refrain from prosecuting simple offensive speech on social media.
The same laws should apply online as they do offline (but how the apply, can differ), and that is currently the case. Most content-related offences in the IPC, etc., are offences online as well as offline.
Editors and journalists exist for most print publications and broadcast programmes, while that isn't true for most 'social media'. So guidelines applicable to the press mostly won't be applicable online.
Electronic publications (like Medianama, The Daily Dish, Huffington Post) which consider themselves engaged in a journalistic venture present a special problem that we do need to have a public conversation about.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/ndtv-video-april-11-2013-the-social-network-regulating-social-media-unrealistic-impossible-necessary

Gandhi, Freedom, and the Dilemmas of Copyright

praskrishna — 2012-04-28T04:11:01Z

To commemorate Mahatma Gandhi's death anniversary, the Centre for Internet and Society cordially invites you to a talk by Prof. Shyamkrishna Balganesh of the University of Pennsylvania on Gandhi, Freedom, and the Dilemmas of Copyright on 30 January 2012 at 6.00 p.m.

When the copyright on Rabindranath Tagore's writings were to expire, his estate sought (and got) an extension in copyright term. But when the copyright on Mahatma Gandhi's writings were to expire, the trustees did not seek such an extension, in deference to Gandhi's views on copyright. On the cover of the first English edition of the Hind Swaraj, it states: "No Rights Reserved". Was Gandhi a Wikipedian at heart, and a prophet who foresaw the 'copyright wars' and had his own visions of how far free culture and free knowledge activism could and could not go?

Description

Central to modern discussions of copyright law is the conflict between copyright’s role as a market-based mechanism of cultural production and its detrimental effects on access to knowledge, free speech, and cultural creativity. So divisive is this debate in the world of copyright law today that some have characterized it as the ongoing “copyright wars”. In January 2009, when copyright in all of Gandhi’s works expired, to the absolute surprise of many, the Navjivan Trust,to whom Gandhi had transferred the copyright in his works, chose not to seek a statutory extension of copyright.

The Trust’s firm decision rested in large part on Gandhi’s unease with copyright law, and his reluctant acceptance of its benefits. Gandhi’s opinions on copyright law reveal a rather concerted attempt to grapple with the innumerable public and private trade-offs that are central to the institution, which are today seen as the very basis of the copyright wars. Much like Gandhi’s views on other issues, they reveal a pragmatism, nuance, and creative engagement, which likely emanate from Gandhi’s training as a lawyer. Instead of simplistically rejecting the institution in its entirety, Gandhi saw copyright law for what it is—an important social compromise—and sought to engage with it in a way that tracked his beliefs on other issues.

This talk will argue that the nuances of Gandhi’s engagement with copyright law hold important lessons for thinking about copyright law in society, and for managing its complex trade-offs. Gandhi’s thinking on the topic anticipated many of the modern dilemmas about the structure and function of copyright law--such as the role of exclusivity, the importance of control and integrity, and the costs and benefits of licensing revenues. And while Gandhi may not have had a clear (or unambiguously correct) solution to any of them, he almost certainly asked the right questions.

About the Speaker

Shyam Balganesh’s scholarship focuses on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts and structures from different areas of the common law. His most recent work tries to understand copyright law’s pre-requisite of “copying” for liability, as a mechanism of pluralistic decision-making that allows it to incorporate both utilitarian and rightsbased considerations into its functioning.

Balganesh received his J.D. from the Yale Law School, where he was an Articles and Essays Editor of the Yale Law Journal and a Student Fellow at the Information Society Project (ISP). Prior to that he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, and received a B.C.L. and an M.Phil in Law from Oxford University.

His recent publications include: ‘“Hot News’: The Enduring Myth of Property in News,” 111 Columbia Law Review 419 (2011); “The Pragmatic Incrementalism of Common Law Intellectual Property,” 63 Vanderbilt Law Review 1543 (2010); and “Foreseeability and Copyright Incentives,” 122 Harvard Law Review 1569 (2009), among others. He is also currently editing a collection of scholarly essays on the topic of intellectual property and the common law, scheduled to be published by the Cambridge University Press in 2012.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/gandhi-freedom-and-copyright

Surveillance in India: Policy and Practice

praskrishna — 2017-03-15T01:05:07Z

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy organized a brainstorming session on net neutrality on February 8, 2017 and a public seminar on surveillance in India the following day on February 9, 2017 in New Delhi. Pranesh Prakash gave a talk.

Pranesh presented a narrative of the current state of surveillance law, our knowledge of current surveillance practices (including noting where programmes like Natgrid, CMS, etc. fit in), and charted a rough map of reforms needed and outstanding policy research questions.

Pranesh Prakash

Pranesh Prakash is a Policy Director at - and was part of the founding team of - the Centre for Internet and Society, a non-profit organisation that engages in research and policy advocacy. He is also the Legal Lead at Creative Commons India and an Affiliated Fellow at the Yale Law School's Information Society Project, and has been on the Executive Committee of the NCUC at ICANN. In 2014, he was selected by Forbes India for its inaugural "30 under 30" list of young achievers, and in 2012 he was recognized as an Internet Freedom Fellow by the U.S. government.

His research interests converge at the intersections of technology, culture, economics, law, and justice. His current work focuses on interrogating, promoting, and engaging with policymakers on the areas of access to knowledge (primarily copyright reform), 'openness' (including open government data, open standards, free/libre/open source software, and open access), freedom of expression, privacy, digital security, and Internet governance. He is a prominent voice on these issues, with the newspaper Mint calling him “one of the clearest thinkers in this area”, and his research having been quoted in the Indian parliament. He regularly speaks at national and international conferences on these topics. He has a degree in arts and law from the National Law School in Bangalore, and while there he helped found the Indian Journal of Law and Technology, and was part of its editorial board for two years.

Click here to see the agenda for the brainstorming session on net neutrality.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/surveillance-in-india-policy-and-practice

Open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet Freedom

sunil — 2012-09-04T08:28:02Z

Last month I wrote an open letter to Hillary Clinton. It was based on a presentation I that I made during a panel discussion at a Google sponsored conference titled Internet at Liberty 2012 in Washington DC on May 24, 2012.

Sunil Abraham's article was published in Thinking Aloud on July 17, 2012

The question that my panel tried to grapple with was "In a world where nearly nine out of ten Internet users are not American, what is the responsibility of United States institutions in promoting internet freedom?" My co-panelists were Cynthia Wong who is with the Centre for Democracy and Technology, Mohamed El Dahshan a writer and journalist, Dunja Mijatovic the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media.

Internet freedom is a curious subject. It is a technology specific liberty - for a moment consider television freedom. The US has more Muslims than India has Christians. But Indian television in the average hotel comes in hundreds and there are at least 3 channels of Christian preaching. But US television in hotels is usually less than 50 channels with no channels of Islamic preaching. In fact even the reception of secular channels from the Islamic World like Al Jazeera is still difficult in America. Can we accuse the US of not having television freedom since their television features Christian evangelists but not Muslim evangelists? Should it be part of India's foreign policy to evangelize television freedom given that there is a large domestic industry with clear international potential?

In an ideal world - citizens will possess technology-neutral freedom to communication and expression. But nothing can be farther from the truth. Communication technologies are regulated using a plethora of policies and practices and very often these have a chilling effect on freedoms.

The following is my response to the technology-specific demands for deregulation from the US Government.

Text of the Open Letter[2]

Recognise Access to Knowledge (A2K) as pre-condition for freedom of expression: There is no difference between aggressive enforcement of imbalanced and obsolete intellectual property laws and censorship. The need of the moment is not more enforcement to protect obsolete business models against the everyday practices of ordinary netizens but rather the reform of intellectual property law (levies, broader exceptions and limitations, pools, statutory and compulsory licenses, prizes etc.) to keep pace with innovations in technology and the production of knowledge and culture.

Recognise privacy as pre-condition for security: The alleged tension between privacy and security is a false dichotomy. Blanket surveillance by design compromises security. Surveillance is like salt in cooking — essential in very small quantities but dangerous even if slightly in excess. Blanket surveillance technologies are only going make things easier for — and will only serve as targets for — current and future online villains.

Don't lose the moral high-ground: Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Other countries are waiting to cherry pick from your worst practices. Also don't use trade agreements to selectively export components of US policy without the accompanying safeguards for civil liberties and rights. Citizens in oppressive and authoritarian states are depending on the US government, courts and civil society to protect their rights online. Don't undermine their capacity to shame their governments by holding up the US as the example of 'how to get things right'. They urgently need the US government to lead by example.

Recognise that freedom of expression has become a trade issue: This is unfortunate but this is true — thanks to the precedent set by the developed world when it came to asymmetric trade negotiations. Just as the US is interested in protecting the interests of its corporations in global markets — other governments are keen protect the interests of their own corporations. The optimal solution in this case is where all countries and corporations are equally unsatisfied. This will remain a continuing discussion.

Address developing country anxieties around critical internet infrastructure: Security by obscurity will no longer do — security by transparency through open standards, technologies and governance is the only way to fears and build a trust-worthy and secure Internet for all of us. For example, there is urgent need to develop standards for supply chain audits of information infrastructure. The US has dealt with the fear of back doors by banning the use of hardware and software from countries it does not trust. The developing world is not sure if there are back-doors in hardware and software manufactured by US corporations.

Time has comes to address this and other related anxieties.

Appreciate diversity in nomenclature: 'Freedom' and 'liberty' may be appropriate terms to use in the United States of America. But openness may be more in countries that are not yet full and robust liberal democracies. The Internet Governance Forum for example uses 'openness' instead of 'freedom'. Openness is also preferred because it includes 'freedom of expression', 'freedom of information' (also known as right to information, access to information or public and 'free knowledge' (free software, open standards, open content, open access, open data, open educational resources, etc.)

Don't be too instrumental in your interventions: Don't undermine the local credibility of like-minded civil society, think-tanks and research organisations by being too directive in your support. Managerialism will undermine reform of policies and practices in information societies and so does inappropriate/premature monitoring and evaluation (for example, looking for explicit attribution in terms of casual connections between your actions and outcomes). There is a need to support greater reflexivity in the global information society by developing institutional capacity in developing countries through unrestricted funding. True critical thinking is the foundation of both scientific progress and open societies. Go out of your way to find and support those who disagree with you. Protect the plural foundation of our networked society!

Video

Sunil Abraham was a speaker along with Cynthia Wong, Mohamed El Dahshan and Dunja Mijatovic in Plenary IV Debate 3 at the Internet at Liberty 2012 event organised by Google on May 24, 2012.

View the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/open-letter-to-hillary-clinton

Do IT Rules 2011 indirectly leads to Censorship of Internet

praskrishna — 2012-05-31T09:00:41Z

Pranesh Prakash along with Dr. Arvind Gupta, National Convener, BJP IT Cell and Ms. Mishi Choudhary, Executive Director, SFLC participated in a panel discussion on censorship of the Internet on May 8, 2012.

The discussion was broadcast on Yuva iTV. See the video below:

Video

Click for the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/do-it-rules-indirectly-lead-to-censorship-of-internet

Vote for the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest!

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:32:00Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos are super excited to present the final videos in the Everyday Digital Native Video Contest. We invite readers to vote for the TOP 5 Videos. The finalists will each win EUR500! Voting closes March 31, 2012

Who’s the Everyday Digital Native? This global video contest has the answer

They effect social change through social media, place their communities on the global map, and share a spiritual connection with the digital world - Meet the Everyday Digital Native

The Everyday Digital Native video contest has got its pulse on what makes youths from diverse socio-cultural backgrounds connect with one another in the global community – it’s an affinity for digital technologies and Web 2.0-mediated platforms coupled with a drive to spearhead social change. The contest invited people from around the world to make a video that would answer the question, ‘Who is the Everyday Digital Native?’. Following a jury-based selection process, the final videos are now online and open for public voting.

Run by the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) with the support of Dutch NGO HIVOS, the contest will see the top five videos with the most votes declared winners on April 1, 2012. The 12 finalists in the video, who come from different parts of the globe, are each vying for the top prize of USD 500 and a chance to have their shorts screened in a film screening and panel discussion hosted by CIS.

Referring to the theme of the contest, Dr Nishant Shah, Director of Research and Co-founder of the Centre, says that the contest aims at highlighting the alternative users of digital technologies. These are people who are often not accounted for either in mainstream discourses of changemakers or in academic biopics on digital natives. “The 12 video proposals show that the everyday digital native does not wake up in the morning and think, ‘hmmm today I will change the world’. And yet, in their everyday lives, when they see the possibility of producing a change in their immediate environments, they turn to the digital to find networks that can start a change”, says Shah.

Apart from the top five public selections, the jury members will be instrumental in picking their two favorites among the finalists. Talking about the range of ideas that participants sent in jury member Leon Tan, a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden, says, “The contest is an exciting project as it has the potential to portray the lives of digital natives from different corners of the world. The generosity of the contestants in creating video proposals is commendable as is the range of ideas suggested. The ideas address both the opportunities and risks of what we might call digital life.”

Adds Shashwati Talukdar, a filmmaker and jury member from India, “It was really interesting to see how different all the proposals were. Some of them were taking the notion of digital native as a personal one and some were very clearly political and sought an intervention in the real world. Dutch digital media artist and jury member Jeroen van Loon refers to a proposal from the USA where the participant wanted to explore the possibility of unplugging from his digital life. “It’s very interesting how digital natives question their own world. The proposals are good examples of how technology and culture constantly change each other. We can learn a lot from the global digital natives.”

Profiles of the finalists and their videos can be viewed here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives

The soon-to-be launched Aadhaar Pay will let you make purchases using your fingerprint

praskrishna — 2017-01-16T03:14:22Z

Paying for your groceries and other goods by using your biometrics instead of an e-wallet, debit card or cash seems to be the next phase in the Centre’s ambitious push to shift the country to a “less cash” economy, as its mandarins term it.

The article by Indulekha Aravind was published in the Economic Times on 15 January 2017. Sunil Abraham was consulted for this.

Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI), says it will be rolling out Aadhaar-enabled payment system, or Aadhaar Pay, for merchants in the next few weeks. This will be an app for merchants that enables them to receive payments through biometric authentication of the customer, provided their bank accounts are linked to their Aadhaar number. "A pilot is under way in fair price shops in Andhra Pradesh where shopkeepers are accepting payments from PDS beneficiaries. The results are very encouraging," says Pandey.

The idea takes off from the existing Aadhaar-enabled payment system (AEPS) used by bank business correspondents (BCs) in rural areas to disburse and accept cash, using micro ATMs. "We are trying to tweak this so that a similar device can be used by a local merchant," says Pandey. Adoption will depend on two factors: merchants’ acceptance of it and whether they can use an app rather than a micro ATM. The biggest advantage through this method of payment, says Pandey, is that the customer will not need a credit or debit card, or even a smartphone.

The limits for transactions using AEPS, such as the number of daily transactions, will be left to the discretion of the banks. In the long term, the AEPS will be migrated to the BHIM (Bharat Interface for Money) platform but the rollout of Aadhaar Pay will happen before that. Post demonetisation, banking BC’s number of transactions using AEPS has leapt from 4-5 lakh to 14-15 lakh, says Pandey. According to Reserve Bank of India data on electronic payment systems, the total volume of such transactions jumped from 671 million in November 2016 to 957 million in December. USSD-based payments, which can be done using a basic feature phone, are among the biggest beneficiaries: the volume rose from just 7,000 in November to 1,02,000 in December, and value of transactions from over Rs 7,000 to over Rs 1 lakh. Prepaid payment instruments — mainly mobile wallets — rose from 59 million to 88 million in the same period (and value from Rs 1,300 crore to Rs 2,100 crore).

While Aadhaar Pay is likely to ride the demonetisation wave if it is launched soon, certain concerns remain, as the list is how secure such a payment system will be. The UIDAI CEO says it is a paramount concern for the organisation, too. "We are using the latest technology to ensure the information stays encrypted end to-end, so that information is not leaked or misused. In the months to come, we will strengthen the security."

Wary About Security
Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, a think tank that has been analysing the Aadhaar project for six years, outlines several reasons why Aadhaar-based biometrics is inappropriate for authentication in payments, unlike card-based payments that use cryptography.

"With biometrics, there is always an error ratio. It is imprecise matching, whereas with cryptography (smart cards), there is no false positive or negative. You either have the key (PIN) or you don’t. It is also very cheap to defeat biometric authentication — even an unlettered person can do it," says Abraham. It would be easy enough, he says, to replicate someone else’s fingerprint by pressing it against lukewarm wax and filling the mould with glue to get a dummy finger. In contrast, compromising a smart card requires more cost and effort, from tech-savviness to machines such as a skimmer that will read the card. "And once you are compromised,you are compromised forever. You can’t change it, like a debit card PIN."

Using Aadhaar for authentication had proved to be a failure during the exchange of currency notes following demonetisation, he adds, pointing to how the poor and the middle class stood in queues for money while stacks of new currency were recovered from the homes of businessmen and bureaucrats. "When you have bank officials who are corrupt, giving them your biometrics is giving them more ammunition for corruption." To catch the criminals, law enforcement agencies had to resort to CCTV footage,a relatively older technology, he says. Others point out that while it may be secure, certain factors stand in the way of making biometrics-based payment authentication a large-scale success. Amrish Rau, CEO of PayU India, a payment gateway provider, cites a list of reasons why it would inevitably take off but only in 5-10 years.

"For one, the technology is not yet good enough. There are also bandwidth and data constraints in sending biometric data," says Rau. Even in more mature markets, it has yet to find widespread acceptance, he says, pointing to the slow adoption of Apple Pay and Samsung Pay in the US. "It’s not the answer today.” This is in contrast to NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant’s recent remarks that cards and PoS machines would become redundant by 2020 because Indians would be making payments using their thumb (biometrics). "... my view is that in the next two and a half years, India will make all its debit cards, credit cards, all ATM machines, all PoS machines totally irrelevant,” Kant had said at a Pravasi Bharatiya Divas session in Bengaluru.

UIDAI’s Pandey is more circumspect. “I wouldn’t say who would replace what. But from the government’s side we are encouraging all modes of digital payment. India has a diverse population and some people might prefer using a card, others a wallet. Collectively, they will contribute to a less-cash society.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-indulekha-aravind-january-15-2017-the-soon-to-be-launched-aadhaar-pay-will-let-you-make-purchases-using-your-fingerprint