Centre for Internet and Society

Facebook goes out all guns blazing in push for Free Basics, Net neutrality advocates cry foul

praskrishna — 2015-12-29T15:32:19Z

Facebook's media onslaught to garner support for its controversial Free Basics program is almost inescapable. Multi-page ads in national dailies, outdoor hoardings, television spots and perhaps the most effective of them all - Facebook notifications.

The blog post was published in IBN Live on December 29, 2015. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, took out time during his paternity leave to pen an op-ed in The Times of India in which he tried to drum up support for the Free Basics service that offers people without the Internet free access to a handful of websites through mobile phones.

"If we accept that everyone deserves access to the Internet, then we must surely support free basic Internet services," Zuckerberg wrote, comparing the Internet to a library, public health care and education.

Zuckerberg said he was surprised that there is such a big debate around Free Basics in India.

The debate on Net neutrality stirred across India after Airtel decided to charge separately for Internet-based calls but withdrew it later after people protested. Internet activists and experts flayed the operator for 'Airtel Zero' service along with Facebook's Internet.org service, later renamed as 'Free Basics.'

Net neutrality implies that equal treatment be accorded to all Internet traffic and no priority be given to an entity or company based on payment to content or service providers such as telecom companies, which is seen as discriminatory.

Zuckerberg's personal appeal comes amid fierce criticism from Net neutrality activists who say Free Basics violates the principle that the whole Internet should be available to all and unrestricted by any one company.

In an op-ed response in The Times of India by Medianama's Nikhil Pahwa, who is also a volunteer with savetheinternet.in that is spearheading the campaign for Net neutrality and against Free Basics, asked why Facebook didn't opt for an option that doesn't violate Net neutrality and "why has Facebook chosen the current model for Free Basics, which gives users a selection of around a hundred sites (including a personal blog and a real estate company homepage), while rejecting the option of giving the poor free access to the open, plural and diverse web?"

Countries like the US, Chile, Netherlands and Brazil have already adopted Net Neutrality that doesn't allow discrimination of Internet content or charge users differently based on the content, site, or platform they consume, the debate is still raging in India with the last date for comments on a paper floated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) that is open for comments till December 30 and counter comments till January 7.

Facebook is using the might of its about 140 million user base in India urging them to send messages to TRAI supporting Free Basics.

A few companies such as Truecaller is attempting to counter Facebook's push by sending out messages to its millions of users in India asking them to petition TRAI against Facebook's Free Basics.

Earlier this month the TRAI ordered Reliance Communications, the sole mobile operator for the Free Basics in India, to suspend it temporarily.

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at Centre for Internet and Society, believes that Free Basics isn't exactly the evil that opponents picture it as. "In the absence of free Internet, Free Basics is a great enabler of freedom of speech. We ought to keep that in mind when asking for a ban," he said.

Meanwhile, Facebook's Internet.org vice president Chris Daniels, in a Reddit AMA said that Facebook was open to scrutiny of the process by any third party agency like IAMAI or NASSCOM and "We'd also be happy to have Twitter, Google+, etc on the platform which many people have asked for."

Earlier, in July this year the Department of Telecom panel on net neutrality has opposed projects like Facebook's Internet.org, which allow access to certain websites without mobile data charges, while suggesting that similar plans such as Airtel Zero be allowed with prior clearance from TRAI.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-goes-out-all-guns-blazing-in-push-for-free-basics-net-neutrality-advocates-cry-foul

Mark Zuckerberg’s India backlash imperils vision for free global web

praskrishna — 2015-12-30T15:25:08Z

The growing backlash against Facebook’s Free Basics could threaten the very premise of Internet.org, Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to connect the planet.

The article by Bhuma Shrivastava was published in Livemint on December 30, 2015. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.

Mumbai: Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see this coming.

When Facebook Inc.’s co-founder proposed bringing free Web services to India, his stated aim was to help connect millions of impoverished people to unlimited opportunity. Instead, critics have accused him of making a poorly disguised land grab in India’s burgeoning Internet sector. The growing backlash could threaten the very premise of Internet.org, his ambitious, two-year-old effort to connect the planet.

Indian authorities are circumspect because the Facebook initiative provides access to only a limited set of websites—undermining the equal access precepts of net neutrality. The telecommunications regulator is calling for initial comments by today on whether wireless carriers can charge differently for data usage across websites, applications and platforms. Losing this fight could imperil Facebook’s Free Basics, which allows customers to access the social network and select services such as Messenger and Microsoft’s Bing without a data plan.

“The India fight is helping shape debates elsewhere,” said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit advocacy group. “Activists in other countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia are watching this debate and will seize the momentum created in India.”

Zuckerberg’s argument for free Web access is based in part on Deloitte research showing that for every 10 people who are connected to the Web, one is lifted out of poverty and one job is created.

Facebook argues that by giving people free access to a small slice of the Internet, they will quickly see the value in paying for the whole thing. Zuckerberg has said his biggest challenge in connecting people to the Web isn’t access to cellular networks, but a social hurdle: he needs to prove to people who have never been online that the Internet is useful.

“Who could possibly be against this?” Zuckerberg wrote in an impassioned op-ed in the Times of India this week. “Surprisingly, over the last year there’s been a big debate about this in India.”

Zuckerberg’s plea underscores what’s at stake. Facebook already attracts 1.55 billion people monthly, or about half of the Internet-connected global population. To keep growing, the world’s largest social network needs to get more people online. Hence the billions of dollars Facebook is spending on projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. And Internet.org, which now spans 37 nations.

India, as the world’s second most populous nation, is arguably the most important piece of Zuckerberg’s Free Basics strategy. But the opposition is fierce. Critics note that the Facebook service doesn’t offer Web favourites such as Google Inc.’s search. Facebook has said it would be open to adding more features from competitors, but critics are skeptical of giving the social-networking giant such influence on the Internet.

Critics also say that by offering a limited swath of the Internet at comparatively slow speeds, the company is creating a poor-man’s or diluted version of the Web. That could stifle innovation by disadvantaging Indian startups building rival apps, or allow Facebook and its telecommunications carrier- partners to act as Internet gatekeepers.

One97 Communications Ltd, a mobile payment startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, is one of several Indian tech companies that have come out against Facebook’s plans.

“We are totally against telcos preferring one developer over another,” One97 founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a phone interview. “We are asking for access neutrality. We are hoping that all startups will be treated equally.”

Facebook is now scrambling to drum up support. It’s started a ‘Save Free Basics In India’ campaign, asking Indian users to support ‘digital equality’ by filling out a form that shoots an e-mail to regulators. That also has the effect of sending notifications to user’s friends unless they opt out.

Facebook has also taken out full-page advertisements, including one featuring a smiling Indian farmer and his family who the ads say used new techniques to double his crop yield. Bloomberg

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/mark-zuckerberg2019s-india-backlash-imperils-vision-for-free-global-web

India’s net neutrality debate is unique and complex

praskrishna — 2015-12-30T16:38:45Z

Connectivity to millions in India is main issue

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh was published in Governance Now on December 14, 2015.

The net neutrality debate has perplexed layman and policy experts alike. For a developing country like India, where a majority of the population doesn’t have access to internet, whether government should stick to the core principles or should it allow flexibility in network management practices to operators is still not clear yet. Whether India should go for an overarching, prophylactic regulation (ex ante), prohibiting any kind of zero rating, or should it adopt evidence-based, contextual regulation (ex post facto)? Whether zero rating should be allowed and if allowed then on what conditions? This is what experts from telecom industry and civil society deliberated in a round table on network neutrality jointly organised by Observer Research Foundation and Centre for Internet and Society on Saturday.

Neutrality refers to open and non-discriminatory nature of internet; information (or say data packets) has always flown freely on the network. Facebook, Google and many other internet businesses have emerged as a result of free and non discriminatory nature of internet.

Warning against taking a 'doctrinaire' approach to net neutrality, a telecom industry expert said that regulators must have flexibility to respond to market demand in the telecom industry. Adding that Indian market is unique with more than seven-ten telecom operators providing internet facility, the expert said that net neutrality will play differently in developing countries.

He said if implemented properly, the zero-rating approach or sponsored content followed by TSPs, “can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Another industry expert said that the regulations on network neutrality has to be contextualized in terms of geography. He criticized the ‘savetheinternet’ movement, which galvanised support of one million internet users in favour of strict neutrality, for preventing one billion people from accessing ‘free’ internet. He said that telecom operators’ revenue from zero rating plans is less than one percent.

He was also against bringing net neutrality under the purview of competition commission of India. He said that there are already several laws related to consumer protection, information technology and monopoly to deal with situations arising out of neutrality issue.

An internet freedom activist said that zero rating can be allowed under stringent conditions of transparency, non-exclusivity and reasonability. He said that one way of setting the neutrality debate would be to allow zero rating with an amount of equal rating. This means that telecom players can offer toll free access to certain websites but they would also have to provide free 100 Mb or 200 Mb data connectivity within which a user can access any website or app for free.

“Countries like the US can afford to debate on net neutrality as almost 90 percent of their population are connected to internet. Here (in India) we should first worry about providing internet access to our people,” an ORF researcher said, speaking on the sidelines of the roundtable discussion.

The neutrality debate is getting momentum again with TRAI’s consultation paper being released on December 9. In its second paper, TRAI suggested, “that TSPs could provide initial data consumption for free, without limiting it to any particular content. Current examples of this approach include allowing free browsing or discounted tariffs for specified time windows, or giving away a certain amount of data for free.”

The regulator also called for regulation that “must seek a balance between ensuring wider access to the internet,” and in the manner that does not allow discrimination in charging tariffs from the users consuming varied content. The regulator has asked all stakeholders in telecom industry to come up with alternative methods in order to provide free access of internet to the consumers, and keep competition and innovation in the market intact.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india2019s-net-neutrality-debate-is-unique-and-complex

Zuckerberg's India Backlash Imperils Free Global Web Vision

praskrishna — 2016-01-06T14:51:42Z

When Facebook's co-founder proposed bringing free Web services to India, his stated aim was to help connect millions of impoverished people to unlimited opportunity. Instead, critics have accused him of making a poorly disguised land grab in India's burgeoning Internet sector. The growing backlash could threaten the very premise of Internet.org, his ambitious, two-year-old effort to connect the planet.

The blog post by Bhuma Shrivastava was published by NDTV on January 4, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

Indian authorities are circumspect because the Facebook initiative provides access to only a limited set of websites -- undermining the equal-access precepts of net neutrality. The telecommunications regulator is calling for initial comments by Jan 7, extending the deadline from today, on whether wireless carriers can charge differently for data usage across websites, applications and platforms.

Losing this fight could imperil Facebook's Free Basics, which allows customers to access the social network and select services such as Messenger and Microsoft's Bing without a data plan.

"The India fight is helping shape debates elsewhere," said Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based non-profit advocacy group. "Activists in other countries such as Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia are watching this debate and will seize the momentum created in India."

Zuckerberg's argument for free Web access is based in part on Deloitte research showing that for every 10 people who are connected to the Web, one is lifted out of poverty and one job is created.

Facebook argues that by giving people free access to a small slice of the Internet, they will quickly see the value in paying for the whole thing. Zuckerberg has said his biggest challenge in connecting people to the Web isn't access to cellular networks, but a social hurdle: he needs to prove to people who have never been online that the Internet is useful.

"Who could possibly be against this?" Zuckerberg wrote in an impassioned op-ed in the Times of India this week. "Surprisingly, over the last year there's been a big debate about this in India."

Zuckerberg's pleas underscore what's at stake. Facebook already attracts 1.55 billion people monthly, or about half of the Internet-connected global population. To keep growing, the world's largest social network needs to get more people online. Hence the billions of dollars Facebook is spending on projects to deliver the Web to under-served areas via drones, satellites and lasers. And Internet.org, which now spans 37 nations.

India, as the world's second most populous nation, is arguably the most important piece of Zuckerberg's Free Basics strategy. But the opposition is fierce. Critics note that the Facebook service doesn't offer Web favorites such as Google's search. Facebook has said it would be open to adding more features from competitors, but critics are skeptical of giving the social-networking giant such influence on the Internet.

Critics also say that by offering a limited swath of the Internet at comparatively slow speeds, the company is creating a diluted version of the Web. That could stifle innovation by causing disadvantages for Indian startups building rival apps, or allow Facebook and its telecommunications carrier-partners to act as Internet gatekeepers.

In a sign of the importance he attaches to the issue, Zuckerberg on Tuesday called one of India's most prominent entrepreneurs to make his case.

One97 Communications, the mobile payments startup backed by Alibaba Group Holding, is one of several tech companies that have come out against Facebook's plans.

"We are totally against telcos preferring one developer over another," One97 founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said in a phone interview before that call. "We are asking for access neutrality. We are hoping that all startups will be treated equally."

Sonia Dhawan, a spokeswoman for One97's payment website Paytm, said the call took place but didn't describe the conversation further. Sharma wasn't available for further comment.

Facebook is now scrambling to drum up support. It's started a "Save Free Basics In India" campaign, asking Indian users to support "digital equality" by filling out a form that shoots an e-mail to regulators. That also has the effect of sending notifications to user's friends unless they opt out.
Facebook has also taken out full-page advertisements, including one featuring a smiling Indian farmer and his family who the ads say used new techniques to double his crop yield.

While countries such as the Philippines have embraced Free Basics, India has been "the outlier and more challenging," Chris Daniels, vice president of Internet.org, said in a Dec. 26 chat on Reddit.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-bhuma-shrivastava-january-4-2016-zuckerberg-india-backlash-imperils-free-global-web-vision

Nasscom against differential pricing for data services

praskrishna — 2016-01-06T15:12:17Z

The National Association of Software and Services Companies says it should be the regulator that decides on such content, not firms.

The article by Moulishree Srivastava was published in Livemint on January 5, 2016. Pranesh Prakash gave inputs.

India’s top software lobby on Monday said if select web content needs to be provided cheaper for some Indians, it must be the regulator that decides on such content, not companies.

In its response to a consultation paper by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on differential pricing for data usage, the National Association of Software and Services Companies (Nasscom) objected to plans such as Free Basics and Airtel Zero where companies choose content to be provided at different speeds and prices, but backed powers for the regulator to allow such a model if the regulator deems they are in “public interest”, while adhering to principles of net neutrality.

“We strongly oppose any model where telecom service providers (TSPs) or their partners have a say or discretion in choosing content that is made available at favourable rates, speed... any differential pricing by TSP either directly such as Airtel Zero or indirectly as in the case of Free Basics through a platform provider which limits access to the internet services or websites (selected by the TSP or by the partners) violate the idea of net neutrality,” said R. Chandrashekhar, president, Nasscom.

“But when we recognize the reality of India as a country which has low internet penetration and even lower broadband penetration, apart from low levels of digital literacy and limited local language content... there may be a need to provide certain services in public interest at differential or lower prices which the regulator feels are necessary,” he said.

“Therefore, it is important that the regulator should have the power to allow differential pricing for certain types or classes of services that are deemed to be in public interest and based on mandatory prior approvals,” he said. “Any such programmes should abide by the principles of net neutrality and not constrain innovation in any way and not constrain innovation in any way.”

Differential pricing for data usage means offering services at different price points to different users. However, analysts say it could lead to an anti-competitive environment, hurting small companies and start-ups, while giving the TSPs and their partner platforms near-monopolistic access to the vast amount of user data that has potential commercial value in a country such as India where privacy laws are not strong.

Differential pricing is a significant aspect of the net neutrality debate that erupted in India in 2015, when Trai released a consultation paper in April. Soon, telecom operator Bharti Airtel Ltd launched Zero, a marketing platform that allows customers to access mobile applications for free but charges the application providers.

Facebook’s Free Basics service (the new name for Internet.org) aims to offer people without the Internet free access to a handful of websites and a range of services through mobile phones, which net neutrality activists say will violate the core principle that everyone should have unrestricted access to Internet and it should not be regulated by a company.

Following the outrage, Trai put Free Basics on hold, asking Reliance Communications Ltd to furnish the detailed terms and conditions of its Free Basics service. The next step will be announced later this month.

In an op-ed in the Times of India last week, Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Infosys Ltd. and former chairman of Unique Identification Authority of India, publicly criticized Facebook’s Free Basics, calling it a walled garden.

“The walled garden of Free Basics goes against the spirit of openness on the internet, and in the guise of being pro-poor, balkanises it. Only Free Basics-approved websites will be accessible for free,” he said in the article which he co-authored with Viral Shah who led the design of government’s subsidy platforms using Aadhaar. “In theory, anyone meeting the technical guidelines today can participate. However, services that may potentially compete with telco offerings may not join Free Basics. Since Facebook does not currently subsidise free usage, telcos will have to foot the bill by raising prices.”

He said schemes such as direct benefit transfer for Internet data packs would be better compared to programmes such as Free Basics.

Nasscom, in its response, recommended “mandatory prior approval of such services by the regulator and sharing of periodic information on tariff plans seek to lower the price as well as zero rating services,” adding that these programmes should abide by the principle of net neutrality, meaning it should not limit consumers access to pre-defined set of services or websites.

“Any such differential pricing programs should have explicit approval of the regulator—and should be deemed to be in the public interest and the onus of proving it to be in the public interest in the first instance would be on service provider and before Trai arrives at a final decision a public consultation is also advised because of the dangers involved,” Nasscom said. “Even after the approval, suitable oversight mechanism should be maintained by the regulator in all such case.”

Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), said Nasscom’s approach to make differential pricing plans and options as an exception rather than the rule was quite reasonable. “It says that if differential pricing services adhere to the guidelines of being non-discriminatory, non-anti-competitive, non-predatory, non-ambiguous and transparent, they can be allowed under the supervision of the regulator, which is similar to the position adopted by CIS,” he said.

“Though some of their positions are ambiguous—for instance what they mean by non-discriminatory, and whether they are okay with differential pricing between classes of applications, are unclear—and some of their recommendations increase regulatory complexity, such as their proposal for independent not-for-profit entities with independent boards to own and manage such differential pricing programs, by and large it is a useful submission,” Prakash added.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livemint-moulishree-srivastava-january-5-2016-nasscom-against-differential-pricing-for-data-services

Will India win net neutrality battle?

praskrishna — 2016-01-11T02:28:44Z

There is more than what meets the eye in Facebook’s ‘noble mission’ of providing internet for all.

The article by Pratap Vikram Singh and Taru Bhatia was published by Governance Now on January 5, 2016. Sunil Abraham gave inputs.

India is gearing up for an era of startups and entrepreneurship and the man pushing it as one of his biggest development and self reliance agenda is none other than prime minister Narendra Modi, who launched the ‘Startup India, Standup India’ campaign this year. Few technology giants, led by the likes of Facebook and some telecom service providers, however, have thrown a technology spanner. It is important to note that a significant number of the startups in India are internet-based – next only to the US and China in having maximum number of tech startups, according to industry body NASSCOM.

For these to flourish and for India to have next Facebook or Google it is important to have an open and neutral internet, believe digital rights experts. A network which doesn’t discriminate between the data packets (smallest unit of information sent in binary format over a network) and provides level playing field for all. “It is critical for the Startup India campaign. If we let the principles of net neutrality be compromised, then it makes it very difficult for entrepreneurs and startups to compete against established players, who can close off the market for upstarts by schemes like differentiated pricing and zero rating (toll free access to websites or apps),” said Vishal Misra, associate professor, department of computer science, Columbia University.

A prerequisite for startups

A few months from now, country’s telecom regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), is going to decide whether internet would remain neutral and whether it will continue to foster innovation. A major threat to net neutrality, according to civil society and digital rights experts, comes from zero rating – toll free access to a few selected websites or apps, a strategy adopted by internet service providers or internet platforms to hook users to those select few sites. For telecom and internet service providers zero rating is a new stream of revenue, a way to secure optimal return on investment from their existing subscriber base – without requiring additional investment. The ISPs are arguing that they should be given more flexibility in managing their network – in a way they should be allowed to assume the role of gatekeeper of the internet.

For ISPs, net neutrality is an obsolete and utopian idea. Facebook, which has grown into a mammoth internet platform since its inception in 2004, has recently joined this bandwagon. Under its Free Basics initiative (erstwhile internet.org), the internet giant provides toll free access to a set of websites (including Facebook obviously!) handpicked by itself to the users. In India so far it has partnered with Reliance Communications.

Facebook by far is the most audacious and aggressive proponent of ‘zero rating’ scheme. From lobbying the prime minister to giving back-to-back ads in television channels and two-page ads in national dailies to circulating a vaguely written letter in support of Free Basics on its social media site, Facebook is pitching for ‘digital equality’ by giving access to 'basic internet’ or say a slice of the internet.

Cautioning against zero rating, Prabir Purkayastha, chairperson, Society for Knowledge Commons, said the way zero-rating is being discussed, it seems Indians are only the consumers of internet, which is not true. “Indians are also the innovators on internet,” said Purkayastha. “Internet has given the innovators the right to connect to the users without having a huge amount of money. This is the character that will be destroyed if zero-rating will be implemented,” he says.

That’s true. Be it US-based Facebook or Google or Indian Flipkart or PayTm or SnapDeal, had it not been for open and neutral internet they wouldn’t have become what are today.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, global public policy director, Access Now, a New York-based firm working for digital rights, said the idea is to prevent a telco or an internet platform from assuming a role of a gatekeeper and control access. Misra, too, has written extensively on the counter-productiveness of zero rating: stifling of innovation and service providers loosing incentive to improve service and keep prices low. Both Misra and Chima testified their views on net neutrality to the standing committee on IT in August after the department of telecommunications submitted an expert committee report on the neutrality issue.

Whither public consultation

To formulate a regulation on how internet will shape up, the TRAI has come out with two consultation papers concerning net neutrality in the last nine months. The first consultation paper on ‘regulatory framework for over the top players (OTTs)’, which came in March, was written in favour of telecom and internet service providers. “It was embarrassing,” said Purkayastha. Over 1.2 million people wrote to the regulator. This was result of the savetheinternet.in campaign ran by free internet activists and lawyers, who were later joined by All India Bakchod (AIB) whose video on net neutrality went viral on YouTube (the video has received three million views in last eight months). This was unprecedented in the history of TRAI consultations. However, the fate of those responses is still unclear.

In December the regulator brought another paper. This time it was titled ‘regulation on differential pricing’. Contrary to the initial paper, this paper is far more objective and reasonable, said Nikhil Pahwa, founder, MediaNama portal and a key volunteer behind savetheinternet.in campaign. The regulator has sought comments on its second paper by December 30 and counter-comments by January 7. Till the time a final call is taken, the telecom regulator has instructed Reliance Communications, Facebook’s India telecom partner, to put Free Basics on hold.

The savetheinternet.in campaign has formulated the responses to the new consultation paper and has made it available for everyone favouring net neutrality to send it to the TRAI. The AIB team has released another video titled ‘Save the Internet - 2 – Judgement Day’, which has been viewed close to one million times in just four months.

The neutrality debate started in India in December 2014 when Airtel, country’s largest telco, announced – although it later backtracked – that the company would charge consumers more for using VOIP services, on top of the data charges. Later, it went on to launch Airtel Zero, wherein it struck deal with online services providers for user access at zero rate. Facebook had already introduced internet.org by then. While it was initially led by civil society, the debate was later joined by politicians – Naveen Patnaik, M Chandrashekhar, Jay Panda, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal – who strongly came out in support of net neutrality.

Facebook has termed its zero rating platform as a philanthropic activity intended to connect billions of unconnected population so that they can access education, health and employment related information. It has urged users to sign a petition, cautioning them against "a small, vocal group of critics" lobbying to prevent 1 billion people from accessing 'affordable internet'. Under Free Basics, Facebook claims, it doesn't charge app developers and includes them if they comply to its 'objective tech specs'.

Free Basics: A camouflage?

Critics, however, call it a walled garden. In providing free access to close to a hundred websites it continues to play the role of a gatekeeper. It is not the poor who decide what to access but Facebook! While it says that it is not making money out of Free Basics as it doesn't display ads in the Free Basics version of Facebook, it keeps the option of monetisation open in the future.

“It [Free Basics] has been camouflaged as charity," said a senior TRAI official, in an off the record conversation. While speaking to the Guardian on Facebook’s zero rating in December, Tim Berners Lee, founder of world wide web (www), said, “In the particular case of somebody who's offering... something which is branded internet, it's not internet, then you just say no. No it isn't free, no it isn't in the public domain, there are other ways of reducing the price of internet connectivity and giving something... [only] giving people data connectivity to part of the network deliberately, I think is a step backwards.”

Speaking in favour of zero rating, Payal Malik, associate professor, economics, Delhi University, said that it is wrong to assume that all consumers will get hooked to zero rated sites. “In a way you are saying that all humans have same preferences and likes and dislikes, which is very unlikely,” said Malik.

Experts representing telecom industry argue that the net neutrality regulation should be geography specific and the telecom players should be given more flexibility in dealing with the network. Mahesh Uppal, a senior telecom consultant and director, ComFirst India, while speaking at a round table discussion in Delhi, said that a majority of population in the West including countries opting for strict net neutrality – including Netherlands, Slovenia and the US – are already connected. "The data connectivity is primarily through fixed lines - copper, co-ax cable or optical fibre wired — wherein it is easier to add capacity to meet traffic growth. However this is difficult to do so for wireless networks," said Uppal. In developing countries, including India, mobile telephony and internet majorly runs on wireless. Hence, he argued, telecom and internet service providers should be given flexibility to zero rate. For Uppal, if zero rating or sponsored content is implemented properly “it can be one of the ways to scale up internet access” to the unconnected regions.

Neutrality proponents, however, differ. “It is basic economic theory, and zero rated sites get a price advantage. There are studies that show customers stay within the world of zero rated sites and never venture outside or are aware of the full internet,” professor Misra said.

Zero or equal rating?

So is there a middle ground? Are there ways to increase access without tampering with open and neutral character of the internet? Experts believe there are. Some of the solutions are not completely black and white, but in between. While there is a fierce opposition to zero rating, it might work, according to Sunil Abraham, executive director, centre for internet and society (CIS), if provided with an amount of equal rating (giving free data pack to users so that they can access any site or app they want).

Mozilla Foundation advocates equal rating. The foundation has sought to create such an alternative in Bangladesh and countries in Africa within the Firefox OS ecosystem. The foundation has tied up with telecom operator Grameenphone in Bangladesh to provide 20 Mb data per day for free to users, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. The model could be easily replicated in India, said Pahwa of MediaNama.

For African countries, the foundation has partnered with Orange. Both allow Africans to purchase $40 Firefox OS smartphones that come packaged with free three to six months of voice calling, text, and up to 500 Mb of monthly data. Purkayastha of Knowledge Commons said that zero-rating plan by telecom operators only makes sense when government services are provided for free through it. “That is the form of zero-rating I would support.”

There are a few platforms which are reimbursing data in megabytes to users accessing partnering apps. The user can then use the free data pack to access any other site or app. Some of them include: mCent, Gigato and DataMi. mCent, owned by Boston-based firm Jana, is a pioneer in this area. It is being used by 30 million users cross 98 countries. In India, according to Jana, one out of every 10 internet users has subscribed to mCent.

Yes, it does violate neutrality as it puts those app providers not having enough money at a disadvantageous position vis-à-vis to those having deep pocket to reimburse data to users. “I think it’s a grey area,” said professor Misra. On the surface it seems to be just like Free Basics, however, Gigato (or mCent) is making no pretense that what they are doing is philanthropy of increasing access, said professor Misra, adding that it is still acceptable as user will have the data to venture out of the walled garden. The senior TRAI official too finds it acceptable. “In my opinion, Facebook should become like Gigato,” he said.

If the regulator is going to protect consumers’ right and also not stifle startups and entrepreneurism, it will have to ensure some broad, core principles of the internet. It will have to prevent both the ISPs and the internet platforms from becoming gatekeepers. It must not allow any throttling, blocking, fast and slow lanes, discrimination based on price or quality of service and distortion of level playing field. How and whether TRAI is going to do these would be clear in a few months.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/governance-now-pratap-vikram-singh-and-taru-bhatia-january-6-2015-will-india-win-net-neutrality-battle

Cambridge Analytica scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook

sunil — 2018-03-28T15:44:00Z

Hegemonic incumbents like Google and Facebook need to be tackled with regulation; govt should use procurement power to fund open source alternatives.

The article was published in the Business Standard on March 28, 2018

The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light when whistleblower Wylie accused Cambridge Analytica of gathering details of 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used this data to psychologically profile these users and manipulated their opinion in favour of Donald Trump. BJP and Congress have accused each other of using the services of Cambridge Analytica in India as well. How can India safeguard the democratic process against such intervention? The author tries to answer this question in this Business Standard Special.

Those that celebrate the big data/artificial intelligence moment claim that traditional approaches to data protection are no longer relevant and therefore must be abandoned. The Cambridge Analytica episode, if anything, demonstrates how wrong they are. The principles of data protection need to be reinvented and weaponized, not discarded. In this article I shall discuss the reinvention of three such data protection principles. Apart from this I shall also briefly explore competition law solutions.

Collect data only if mandated by regulation

One, data minimization is the principle that requires the data controller to collect data only if mandated to do so by regulation or because it is a prerequisite for providing a functionality. For example, Facebook’s messenger app on Android harvests call records and meta-data, without any consumer facing feature on the app that justifies such collection. Therefore, this is a clear violation of the data minimization principle. One of the ways to reinvent this principle is by borrowing from the best practices around warnings and labels on packaging introduced by the global anti-tobacco campaign. A permanent bar could be required in all apps, stating ‘Facebook holds W number of records across X databases over the time period Y, which totals Z Gb’. Each of these alphabets could be a hyperlink, allowing the user to easily drill down to the individual data record.

Consent must be explicit, informed and voluntary

Two, the principle of consent requires that the data controller secure explicit, informed and voluntary consent from the data subject unless there are exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, consent has been reduced to a mockery today through obfuscation by lawyers in verbose “privacy notices” and “terms of services”. To reinvent consent we need to bring ‘Do Not Dial’ registries into the era of big data. A website maintained by the future Indian data protection regulator could allow individuals to check against their unique identifiers (email, phone number, Aadhaar). The website would provide a list of all data controllers that are holding personal information against a particular unique identifier. The data subject should then be able to revoke consent with one-click. Once consent is revoked, the data controller would have to delete all personal information that they hold, unless retention of such information is required under law (for example, in banking law). One-click revocation of consent will make data controllers like Facebook treat data subjects with greater respect.

There must be a right to explanation

Three, the right to explanation, most commonly associated with the General Data Protection Directive from the EU, is a principle that requires the data controller to make transparent the automated decision-making process when personal information is implicated. So far it has been seen as a reactive measure for user empowerment. In other words, the explanation is provided only when there is a demand for it.

The Facebook feeds that were used for manipulation through micro-targeting of content is an example of such automated decision making. Regulation in India should require a user empowerment panel accessible through a prominent icon that appears repeatedly in the feed. On clicking the icon the user will be able to modify the objectives that the algorithm is maximizing for. She can then choose to see content that targets a bisexual rather than a heterosexual, a Muslim rather than a Hindu, a conservative rather a liberal, etc. At the moment, Facebook only allows the user to stop being targeted for advertisements based on certain categories. However, to be less susceptible to psychological manipulation, the user should be allowed to define these categories, for both content and advertisements.

How to fix the business model?

From a competition perspective, Google and Facebook have destroyed the business model for real news, and replaced it with a business model for fake news, by monopolizing digital advertising revenues. Their algorithms are designed to maximize the amount of time that users spend on their platforms, and therefore, don’t have any incentive to distinguish between truth and falsehood. This contemporary crisis requires three types of interventions: one, appropriate taxation and transparency to the public, so that the revenue streams for fake news factories can be ended; two, the construction of a common infrastructure that can be shared by all traditional and new media companies in order to recapture digital advertising revenues; and three, immediate action by the competition regulator to protect competition between advertising networks operating in India.

The Google challenge

With Google, the situation is even worse, since Google has dominance in both the ad network market and in the operating system market. During the birth of competition law, policy-makers and decision-makers acted to protect competition per se. This is because they saw competition as an essential component of democracy, open society, innovation, and a functioning market. When the economists from the Chicago school began to influence competition policy in the USA, they advocated for a singular focus on the maximization of consumer interest. The adoption of this ideology has resulted in competition regulators standing powerlessly by while internet giants wreck our economy and polity. We need to return to the foundational principles of competition law, which might even mean breaking Google into two companies. The operating system should be divorced from other services and products to prevent them from taking advantage of vertical integration. We as a nation need to start discussing the possible end stages of such a breakup.

In conclusion, all the fixes that have been listed above require either the enactment of a data protection law, or the amendment of our existing competition law. This, as we all know, can take many years. However, there is an opportunity for the government to act immediately if it wishes to. By utilizing procurement power, the central and state governments of India could support free and open source software alternatives to Google’s products especially in the education sector. The government could also stop using Facebook, Google and Twitter for e-governance, and thereby stop providing free advertising for these companies for print and broadcast media. This will make it easier for emerging firms to dislodge hegemonic incumbents.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-march-28-2018-sunil-abraham-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-india-can-save-democracy-from-facebook

CIS’ Comments to the Christchurch Call

Tanaya Rajwade, Elonnai Hickok, and Raouf Kundil Peedikayil — 2019-11-04T14:13:13Z

In the wake of the Christchurch terror attacks, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern, and the President of France, Emmanuel Macron co-chaired the Christchurch Call to Action in May 2018 to “bring together countries and tech companies in an attempt to bring to an end the ability to use social media to organise and promote terrorism and violent extremism.”

Fifty one supporters, including India, and eight tech companies have jointly agreed to a set of non-binding commitments and ongoing collaboration to eliminate violent and extremist content online. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and Amazon are all among the online service provider signatories that released a joint statement welcoming the call and committing to a nine-point action plan.

The Call has been hailed by many as a step in the right direction, as it represents the first collaboration between governments and the private sector companies to combat the problem of extremist content online at this scale. However, the vagueness of the commitments outlined in the Call and some of the proposed mechanisms have raised concerns about the potential abuse of human rights by both governments and tech companies.

This response is divided into two parts - Part One examines the call through the lens of human rights, and Part Two thinks through the ways in which India can adhere to the commitments in the Call, and compares the current legal framework in India with the commitments outlined in the Call.

Click to read the comments here. The comments were prepared by Tanaya Rajwade, Elonnai Hickok, and Raouf Kundil Peedikayil and edited by Gurshabad Grover and Amber Sinha.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/tanaya-rajwade-elonnai-hickok-and-raouf-kundil-peedikayil-october-31-2019-comments-to-christchurch-call

Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond”

Admin — 2019-03-07T14:52:09Z

Sunil Abraham will be a speaker at this event organized by TRAI on March 15 at Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennai. Sunil will be speaking on How should Internet Giants- Social Media, Search engines and ad tech be Regulated.

Click to view the agenda.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/seminar-on-201cevolution-of-communication-social-media-beyond201d

What’s up with WhatsApp?

Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham — 2018-04-23T16:45:51Z

In 2016, WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption, but is the company doing what it claims to be doing?

The article by Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham was published in Asia Times on April 20, 2018.

Back in April 2016, when WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for its billion-plus strong user base as a default setting, the messaging behemoth signaled to its users it was at the forefront of providing technological solutions to protect privacy.

Emphasized in the security white paper explaining the implementation of the technology is the encryption of both forms of communication – one-to-one and group and also of all types of messages shared within such communications – text as well as media.

Simply put, all communication taking place over WhatsApp would be decipherable only to the sender and recipient – it would be virtual gibberish even to WhatsApp.

This announcement came in the backdrop of Apple locking horns with the FBI after being asked to provide a backdoor to unlock the San Bernardino mass shooter’s iPhone. This further reinforced WhatsApp Inc’s stand on the ensuing debate between the interplay of privacy and security in the digital age.

Kudos to WhatsApp, for there is growing discussion around how encryption and anonymity is central to enabling secure online communication which in turn is integral to essential human rights such as those of freedom of opinion and expression.

WhatsApp may have taken encryption to the masses, but here we outline why WhatsApp’s provisioning of privacy and security measures needs a more granular analysis – is the company doing what it claims to be doing? Security issues with WhatsApp’s messaging protocol certainly are not new.

Man-in-the-middle attacks

A study published by a group of German researchers from Ruhr University highlighted issues with WhatsApp’s implementation of its E2EE protocol to group communications. Another paper points out how WhatsApp’s session establishment strategy itself could be problematic and potentially be targeted for what are called man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.

An MITM attack takes the form of a malicious actor, as the term suggests, placing itself between the communicating parties to eavesdrop or impersonate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also highlighted other security vulnerabilities, or trade-offs, depending upon ideological inclinations, with respect to WhatsApp allowing for storage of unencrypted backups, issues with WhatsApp’s web client and also with its approach to cryptographic key change notifications.

Much has been written questioning WhatsApp’s shifting approach to ensuring privacy too. Quoting straight from WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy: “We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies.” Speaking of Facebook …

Culling out larger issues with WhatsApp’s privacy policies is not the intention here. What we specifically seek to explore is right at the nexus of WhatsApp’s security and privacy provisioning clashing with its marketing strategy: the storage of data on WhatsApp’s servers, or ‘blobs,’ as they are referred to in the technical paper. Facebook’s rather. In WhatsApp’s words: “Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device.”

In fact, this non-storage of data on their ‘blobs’ is emphasizes at several other points on the official website. Let us call this the deletion-upon-delivery model.

A simple experiment

While drawing up a rigorous proof of concept, made near-impossible thanks to WhatsApp being a closed source messaging protocol, a simple experiment is enough to raise some very pertinent questions about WhatsApp’s outlined deletion-upon-delivery model. It should, however, be mentioned that the Signal Protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems and pivotal in WhatsApp’s rolling out of E2EE is open source. Here is how the experiment proceeds:

Rick sends Morty an attachment.

Morty then switches off the data on her mobile device.

Rick downloads the attachment, an image.

Subsequently, Rick deletes the image from his mobile device’s internal storage.

Rick then logs into a WhatsApp’s web client on his browser. (Prior to this experiment, both Rick and Morty had logged out from all instances of the web client)

Upon a fresh log-in to the web client and opening the chat with Morty, the option to download the image is available to Rick.

The experiment concludes with bewilderment at WhatsApp’s claim of deletion-upon-delivery as outlined earlier. The only place from which Morty could have downloaded the image would be from Facebook’s ‘blobs.’ The attachment could not have been retrieved from Morty’s mobile device as it had no way of sending data and neither from Rick’s mobile device as it no longer existed in the device’s storage.

As per the Privacy Policy, the data is stored on the ‘blobs’ for a period of 30 days after transmission of a message only when it can’t be delivered to the recipient. Upon delivery, the deletion-upon-delivery model is supposed to kick in.

Another straightforward experiment that leads to a similar conclusion is seeing the difference in time taken for a large attachment to be forwarded as opposed to when the same large attachment is uploaded. Forwarding is palpably quicker than uploading afresh: non-storage of attachments on the ‘blob’ would entail that the same amount should be taken for both.

The plot thickens. WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy goes on to state: “To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time.” The technical paper offers no help in understanding how WhatsApp systems assess frequently shared encrypted media messages without decrypting it at its end.

A possible explanation could be the usage of metadata by WhatsApp, which it discloses in its Privacy Policy while simultaneously being sufficiently vague about the specifics of it. That WhatsApp may be capable of reading encrypted communication through the inclusion of a backdoor bodes well for law enforcement, but not so much for unsuspecting users.

The weakest link in the chain

Concerns about backdoors in WhatsApp’s product have led the French government to start developing their own encrypted messaging service. This will be built using Matrix – an open protocol designed for real-time communication. Indeed, the Privacy Policy lays out that the company “may collect, use, preserve, and share your information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to respond pursuant to applicable law or regulations, to legal process, or to government requests.”

The Signal Protocol is the undisputed gold standard of E2EE implementations. It is the integration with the surrounding functionality that WhatsApp offers which leads to vulnerabilities. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Assuming that the attachments stored on the ‘blobs’ are in encrypted form, indecipherable to all but the intended recipients, this does not pose a privacy risk for the users from a technological point of view.

However, it is easy lose sight of the fact that the Privacy Policy is a legally binding document and it specifically states that messages are not stored on the ‘blobs’ as a matter of routine. As a side note, WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are refreshing in their readability and lack of legalese.

As we were putting the final touches to this piece, news from WABetaInfo, a well-reputed source of information on WhatsApp features, has broken that newer updates of WhatsApp for Android are permitting users to re-download media deleted up to three months back. WhatsApp cannot possibly achieve this without storing the media in the ‘blobs,’ or in other words, in violation of its Privacy Policy.

As the aphorism goes: “When the service is free, you are the product.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp

Indian police set up lab to monitor social media

praskrishna — 2013-03-19T09:23:12Z

Mumbai police have set up India's first "social media lab" to monitor Facebook, Twitter and other networking sites, sparking concerns about freedom of speech online.

This was published by AFP on March 18, 2013. This was also carried in Global Post on the same day. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

A specially-trained team of 20 police officers will staff the lab, which was launched over the week end and will work around the clock to keep an eye on issues being publicly discussed and track matters relating to public order.

"They will work under Special Branch. They will monitor and find out which topics are trending among the youth so we can plan law and order in a good way," police spokesman Satyanarayan Choudhary told AFP on Monday.

In November police sparked outrage and fierce debate about India's Internet laws by arresting two young women over a Facebook post criticising the shutdown of Mumbai after the death of a local hardline politician.

The pair were arrested under laws including section 66a of the Information Technology Act, which forbids "sending false and offensive messages through communication services" and can lead to three years in jail.

The case followed several arrests across the country for political cartoons or comments made online.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society research group, said the "natural reaction" was to worry about the new police lab given the way the law has been used.

"Police in the last four years have acted in an arbitrary and random fashion, often using the IT Act to settle political scores," he told AFP.

"When there's no crisis for the police, proactively keeping an eye on what people are saying or doing is overkill," he said.

Choudhary said the lab was not set to censor comments, echoing a statement made by police commissioner Satyapal Singh at the launch.

"By reading the mindset of what people are writing on various modes of communication, we will try to provide better and improved safety and security to the Mumbai citizens," Singh said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/afp-march-18-2013-indian-police-set-up-lab-to-monitor-social-media

The net is taking over

praskrishna — 2014-02-04T05:57:16Z

For many days to come, people will speculate what caused Sunanda Pushkar's death last week in a New Delhi hotel. Did Union minister Shashi Tharoor's wife die of poisoning or a drug overdose? Wasn't she unwell? Was it suicide? Or was it murder? No less a matter of speculation has been the social media's role in the whole affair.

The article by Veenu Sandhu and Surabhi Agarwal published in the Business Standard on January 24, 2014 quotes Sunil Abraham.

Writer Suketu Mehta has called it "murder by Twitter". Pushkar's very public spat with Mehr Tarar, a Pakistani journalist, on the micro-blogging site, many psychologists feel, may have multiplied her anguish. Apart from other things, Tarar had tweeted: "The blonde's aqal is weaker thn (sic) her grammar & spellings." Still others believe Pushkar had the premonition that end was near, and it was there for all to see on social media. "Hasta hua jayega," (will go laughing), she had tweeted a few days before her death.

Social media is no longer time-pass in the country, certainly not with over 90 million users. The line that divides online and offline lives has blurred. Networking sites have begun to impact human behaviour. Lives are being lived in the open: open to comment, analysis and abuse. Mahesh Murthy, the founder of digital brand management firm Pinstorm, calls it the "demise of the culture of secrecy". This is the age, he says, "of diversity, of coming out in the open with sexual preferences et cetera. Social media will help slaughter sacred cows. It is a good thing to happen, except for the sacred cows." According to Murthy, the pitfalls of uncensored speech are for those "who think they can control their lives or are insecure".

But pitfalls are showing up. Some time ago, a high-profile couple from Delhi approached marriage and family counsellor Nisha Khanna. Their problem was aggravated by the wife's obsession with Facebook, to the extent that she would put out everything, including the ups and downs of her relationship with her husband, as status messages for the consumption of her social media friends and acquaintances. The husband was livid - he felt exposed. It took six months of rigorous counselling before the wife started controlling, though marginally, her social media behaviour. "We are seeing obsession, irrationality and an inability to spot the very thick line that divides the private from the public," says Varkha Chulani, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and consultant with Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. People, she adds, are looking for Facebook 'like' buttons even in real life.

Feelings of extreme happiness, depression, loneliness and even suicidal thoughts are being shared not with family and friends but with Facebook 'connections' and Twitter 'followers'. Tweets or status updates that point to suicidal tendencies, in particular, can be telling. Some of these key expressions are "depressed", "feeling abused", "it's over" or "empty inside". A study - Tracking Suicide Risk Factors through Twitter - conducted in the US last year found a strong correlation between the number of tweets that indicated suicidal intentions and the number of suicides committed.

Having realised that the platform is also being used as a medium to vent and express personal trauma, Facebook has, for about a year, been sending reports on profiles of people with suicide risk to Mumbai-based suicide helpline Aasra. "In the last one year, we have received 350 such email intimations concerning Indians," says Aasra Director Johnson Thomas. Aasra then mails that person to subtly and sensitively convey that there is help at hand, in case it is needed. Facebook and Twitter did not offer any comment for this article.

Decoding Social Media Slang

I am an aggregator who has left a cookie crumb trail (while writing this) for a machine algorithm to follow. So, can it point out to my boss the scoops and their origin? In all probability, yes. For an all-devouring algorithm, no crumb, no target, is too small. Algorithms (at their core, a step-by-step method for doing a job) can sound scary, but social media analysts depend on these little-understood, obscure mathematical creatures.

So, information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites are fair game for these data predators. Suppose you click ‘like’ on Facebook, you’re giving away a lot more than you might think. Your ‘likes’ can be pieced together to form an eerily true portrait of yourself. A study of 58,000 volunteers by Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell (University of Cambridge) and Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) charts the chances of an accurate prediction: 67 per cent for single versus in a relationship, 73 per cent for cigarette smoking, 70 per cent for alcohol drinking, 65 per cent for drug use, 88 per cent for male homosexuality, 75 per cent for female homosexuality, and 93 per cent for gender.

Another point is not all data out there are cold facts. Far from that, most are sentiments and slang: sweet, bitter and often intimate. “Wazup homie!! howz it going!!” is a profound example. “‘Yo, homie, I'll be at my house in case you want to come kick it later” is another. How is a number cruncher such as an algorithm expected to crunch slang and emotions? But experts insist there’s a bull market in sentiments and foul language. And an emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape. The simplest algorithms here work by scanning keywords to categorise a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (‘love’ is good, ‘hate’ is bad). But a more reliable analysis requires decoding many linguistic shades of gray. For example, to get at the true intent of a statement like ‘dude, i'm like......duuuude,’ the software will have to activate several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?)

“People first thought that emotions expressed on social media were just cute and stupid,” says Sreeju Thankan who has done computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and is now working at Mango Solutions. “Now, they are recognising it as a rich vein.” But translating slang into binary code can be much tougher. “Sentiments are different from conventional facts,” says Thankan. “There is a long way for slang patrol to go.” For casual web surfers, a simpler sentiment-analysis tool, Tweetfeel, is available. It tells you the numbers of positive and negative tweets on a given topic. It also gives you their percentages. Its analysis is based not just on emoticons, but also words and phrases.

Ashish Sharma

Last October in Mumbai, a 17-year-old college student, Aishwarya Dahiwal, killed herself after her parents barred her from using Facebook. "Is Facebook so bad? I cannot stay in a home with such restrictions as I can't live without Facebook," her suicide note reportedly read. The parents were in utter shock. "Girls are more prone to putting personal and emotional messages on social networking sites," says Manju Chhabra, child counsellor who runs an organisation called Cactus Lily in Delhi. And they tend to get more affected by what people say and how they react. "And comments on this very impersonal medium which we are giving a very personal space can be very cruel."

Seema Hingorrany, a Mumbai-based psychologist, says one of her recent patients is a girl studying in Class 9. Her friend from school had uploaded a photo of herself, which got 200 'likes'. That upset the patient terribly because it reinforced her belief that she was unattractive and she became extremely upset, to the extent that her parents felt she needed counselling. Constant use of Facebook can affect one's self-esteem, if it's already low. Another of Hingorrany's patient was a 30-year-old who took to social media after he lost his job. But seeing other people's photos and updates made him increasingly jealous, and he began posting nasty comments. The recipients of his ire began "unfriending" him, which only made him more withdrawn.

Irrational behaviour can also be seen in the world of random video chat. Sites like Omegle and Chatroulette aim to bring together surfers together with the help of webcams. The promise is irresistible: an endless stream of visitors in your room. When Ashish Sharma (the author of the accompanying article) logged on, he met a gaggle of girls who giggled endlessly, a German painter who was looking for his muse and wanted him to pose in a state of undress, a Swede who danced around and asked him to sing in praise of his bottom, and a man with an iron mask. It was crude and shocking. The excessively sexual behaviour can be unsettling for an unsuspecting (and young) visitor.

There is another side to it. "Twitter posts," says an article posted on rediff.com, "have saved lives. A man lost on a ski slope in Switzerland got help when he tweeted his predicament. Another got bail from arrest as his friends discovered from a tweet that he was jailed in a foreign country." Human resource managers check out the profiles of job applicants on social media. "People might mask many judgmental things in an interview; there is a possibility that they might express it on social media," says Debdas Sen, leader of technology consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Inclusion and diversity are important for us." But job seekers have become wise to it. That's why many airbrush their social media profiles. All politically incorrect posts are removed. Friends are treated lavishly offline so that they write nice posts on Facebook pages. Some even hire professional photographers for as much as Rs 20,000 to paste good profile pictures.

But those who hire have started to see through it. Says Murthy of Pinstrip, "One can easily figure out the truthfulness of your statements by seeing what your friends are saying." One human resource manager says he pays more attention to what people post after 10 pm because "it tends to be more truthful". A senior functionary of a Gurgaon-headquartered firm says that he had hired somebody after he had found nothing suspicious on his LinkedIn profile; it was only later he found out that this person had been involved in some financial misdemeanour in his earlier job. "His LinkedIn profile had no clues, he was not on Facebook. That should have struck me," he says. Of course, the person was asked to leave.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, says social media has made people forget the distinction between private, semi-private and public statements. "Speech used to be ephemeral, but Internet has given it the power it never had," he says. "Internet never forgets." The fact that traces of a communication may remain in cyberspace even after they have been deleted has prompted a legislation called the Right to Erasure by the European Union. Under the law, earlier called Right to be Forgotten, an individual can request all his data to be erased, including by third parties. India is also mulling a similar legislation under its Privacy Bill.

Those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who have little to lose, express themselves most freely on social media, while those with reputations to protect are cautious. The consequences can be serious, as the Mumbai girl who questioned the city's shutdown after Bal Thackeray's death in November 2012 on Facebook and her friend who "liked" realised: both were called in by the police. It's not surprising why even standup comedians, who can't resist taking potshots at one and all, turn extremely careful before they tweet.

So, is social media good or bad? "Social media can help," Amartya Sen said at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, "But you must read more books".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/business-standard-january-24-2014-veenu-sandhu-surabhi-agarwal-the-net-is-taking-over

FOEX Live: June 1-7, 2014

geetha — 2014-06-07T13:33:45Z

A weekly selection of news on online freedom of expression and digital technology from across India (and some parts of the world).

Delhi NCR:

Following a legal notice from Dina Nath Batra, publisher Orient BlackSwan “set aside… for the present” Communalism and Sexual Violence: Ahmedabad Since 1969 by Dr. Megha Kumar, citing the need for a “comprehensive assessment”. Dr. Kumar’s book is part of the ‘Critical Thinking on South Asia’ series, and studies communal and sexual violence in the 1969, 1985 and 2002 riots of Ahmedabad. Orient BlackSwan insists this is a pre-release assessment, while Dr. Kumar contests that her book went to print in March 2014 after extensive editing and peer review. Dina Nath Batra’s civil suit led Penguin India to withdraw Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History earlier this year.

The Delhi Police’s Facebook page aimed at reaching out to Delhi residents hailing from the North East proved to be popular.

Goa:

Shipbuilding engineer Devu Chodankar’s ordeal continued. Chodankar, in a statement to the cyber crime cell of the Goa police, clarified that his allegedly inflammatory statements were directed against the induction of the Sri Ram Sene’s Pramod Muthalik into the BJP. Chodankar’s laptop, hard-disk and mobile Internet dongle were seized.

Jammu & Kashmir:

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah announced the withdrawal of a four-year-old SMS ban in the state. The ban was instituted in 2010 following widespread protests, and while it was lifted for post-paid subscribers six months later, pre-paid connections were banned from SMSes until now.

Maharashtra:

In a move to contain public protests over ‘objectionable posts’ about Chhatrapati Shivaji, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar and the late Bal Thackeray (comments upon whose death led to the arrests of Shaheen Dhada and Renu Srinivasan under Section 66A), Maharashtra police will take action against even those who “like” such posts. ‘Likers’ may be charged under the Information Technology Act and the Criminal Procedure Code, say Nanded police.

A young Muslim man was murdered in Pune, apparently connected to the online publication of ‘derogatory’ pictures of Chhatrapati Shivaji and Bal Thackarey. Members of Hindu extremists groups celebrated his murder, it seems. Pune’s BJP MP, Anil Shirole, said, “some repercussions are natural”. Members of the Hindu Rashtra Sena were held for the murder, but it seems that the photographs were uploaded from foreign IP addresses. Across Maharashtra, 187 riotingcases have been registered against a total of 710 persons, allegedly in connection with the offensive Facebook posts.

On a lighter note, Bollywood hopes for a positive relationship with the new government on matters such as film censorship, tax breaks and piracy.

News & Opinion:

Shocking the world, Vodafone reported the existence of secret, direct-access wires that enable government surveillance on citizens. India is among 29 governments that sought access to its networks, says Vodafone.

I&B Minister Prakash Javadekar expressed his satisfaction with media industry self-regulation, and stated that while cross-media ownership is a matter for debate, it is the legality of transactions such as the Reliance-Network18 acquisition that is important.

Nikhil Pahwa of Medianama wrote of a ‘right to be forgotten’ request they received from a user in light of the recent European Court of Justice ruling. The right raises a legal dilemma in India, LiveMint reports. Medianama also comments on Maharashtra police’s decision to take action against Facebook ‘likes’, noting that at the very least, a like and a comment do not amount to the same thing.

The Hindu was scorching in its editorial on the Pune murder, warning that the new BJP government stands to lose public confidence if it does not clearly demonstrate its opposition to religious violence. The Times of India agrees.

Sanjay Hegde wrote of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 (as amended in 2008) as a medium-focused criminalization of speech. dnaEdit also published its criticism of Section 66A.

Ajit Ranade of the Mumbai Mirror comments on India as a ‘republic of hurt sentiments’, criminalizing exercises of free speech from defamation, hate speech, sedition and Section 66A. But in this hurt and screaming republic, dissent is crucial and must stay alive.

A cyber security expert is of the opinion that the police find it difficult to block webpages with derogatory content, as servers are located outside India. But data localization will not help India, writes Jayshree Bajoria.

Dharma Adhikari tries to analyze the combined impact of converging media ownership, corporate patronage of politicians and elections, and recent practices of forced and self-censorship and criminalization of speech.

Elsewhere in the world:

In Pakistan, Facebook has been criticized for blocking pages of a Pakistani rock band and several political groups, primarily left-wing. Across the continent in Europe, Google is suffering from a popularity dip.

The National Council for Peace and Order, the military government in Thailand, has taken over not only the government,but also controls the media. The military cancelled its meetings with Google and Facebook. Thai protesters staged a quiet dissent. The Asian Human Rights Commission condemned the coup. For an excellent take on the coup and its dangers, please redirect here. For a round-up of editorials and op-eds on the coup, redirect here.

China has cracked down on Google, affecting Gmail, Translate and Calendar. It is speculated that the move is connected to the 25^th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and government reprisal. At the same time, a Tibetan filmmaker who was jailed for six years for his film, Leaving Fear Behind, has been released by Chinese authorities. Leaving Fear Behind features a series of interviews with Tibetans of the Qinghai province in the run-up to the controversial Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Japan looks set to criminalize possession of child pornography. According to reports, the proposed law does not extend to comics or animations or digital simulations.

Egypt’s police is looking to build a social media monitoring system to track expressions of dissent, including “profanity, immorality, insults and calls for strikes and protests”.

Human rights activists asked Facebook to deny its services to the election campaign of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, ahead of elections on June 3.

Call for inputs:

The Law Commission of India seeks comments from stakeholders and citizens on media law. The consultation paper may be found here. The final date for submission is June 19, 2014.

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For feedback and comments, Geetha Hariharan is available by email at geetha@cis-india.org or on Twitter, where her handle is @covertlight.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/foex-live-june-1-7-2014

Facebook: Limiting access to social media can restrict freedom of speech

praskrishna — 2013-08-08T04:07:38Z

In its counter-affidavit to the PIL in the Delhi high court, Facebook has argued that limiting access to social media can limit an individual's freedom of speech and expression.

Kim Arora's article was published in the Times of India on August 1, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

The PIL, among other things, deals with the issue of minors accessing Facebook services, arguing that under the Indian Contract Act 1872, minors can't enter into a contract. The PIL will be heard next on Friday.

Last year, the UN Human Rights Council had passed a resolution declaring access to Internet as a human right. Facebook has argued making a similar point for access to social media. "The Internet is increasingly becoming a platform for citizens including minors to interact and voice their opinions and, therefore, a meaningful interpretation of the right to freedom of speech and expression would include the freedom to access social media," the counter-affidavit says.

"It can be argued that in a technologically mediated society, social media and communication infrastructure is essential to exercise freedom of expression," says Sunil Abraham, director, Bangalore-based Center for Internet and Society.

Cyber lawyer Pavan Duggal sees it as "hyperbole". "The issue still remains that a minor doesn't have the capacity to act under the Contract Act," he says. Lawyers say that if a contract is entered into for free service in exchange of personal information, it is a "consideration" (like cash or kind) under the Indian Contract Act 1872. The Act says, "All agreements are contracts if they are made by the free consent of parties competent to contract, for a lawful consideration and with a lawful object, and are not hereby expressly declared to be void." It then lists minors as incompetent to contract, and says, "The agreement, if any party is minor, is void ab initio." However, Abraham points out that "It is not an offence to enter a void contract."

To weed out fake profiles and children's profiles, the PIL, filed by former RSS ideologue K N Govindacharya, argues that "obligation is cast upon Facebook and other social networking sites to verify the authenticity of each and every subscribers (sic) which is mandatory for Mobile companies in telecommunication sector.

Mumbai-based professor of law Saurav Datta feels this sort of authentication could have serious privacy implications. "There is no way they can verify users without impinging on their privacy. The goal of the PIL is wrong. We need to protect children, not keep people out," says Datta.

Abraham says that a possible way to deal with this can be on the lines of Canadian privacy law where a privacy commissioner can raise such concerns with the service provider directly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-aug-1-2013-kim-arora-facebook-limiting-access-to-social-media-can-restrict-freedom-of-speech

Daunting task ahead for investigative agencies with WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption

praskrishna — 2016-04-09T09:45:12Z

Messaging service WhatsApp's decision to roll out end-to-end encryption for over 1 billion subscribers has been hailed as a positive step by users across the world, although things are set to get tougher for law enforcement and investigative agencies in India seeking to track terrorists.

The article by Neha Alawadhi was published in Economic Times on April 8, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

"It was anyway difficult to get any kind of data from WhatsApp and now it is going to be even more difficult," said a person familiar with the working of these agencies who did not wish to be identified.

Encryption scrambles data such as text messages, photos and documents and makes them unintelligible for unintended recipients. A service that is encrypted end-to-end cannot be monitored or intercepted. No one, except the people or group communicating with each other, can access the data. If telecom companies, Internet providers or even companies that run messaging services try to intercept the message, all they would get is garbled data.

While chats will not be accessible, associated information known as metadata will be available, such as when the conversations took place, the identities of senders and recipients, their locations, mobile numbers, profile photos and address books, which may be useful for security agencies.

"Definitely for law enforcement it means a big headache, but the metadata is there and with metadata, if you have a couple of other bits of information, you can piece it together," said Sunil Abraham, executive director at Bengaluru-based research organisation Centre for Internet and Society. "Agencies can get the metadata, but they won't get the payload unless they're able to compromise the device. And that intelligence agencies like NSA (National Security Agency of the US) have been able to do in the past."

While encryption offers privacy and security to users, it is the bane of law enforcement agencies globally, as exemplified most recently and notably by the Apple-FBI dispute in the US. The Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI asked Apple to weaken its encryption to access a dead terrorist's iPhone data and after the company refused, hacked into the device with help from a third party.

In India, it is difficult to bring US-based companies to the negotiating table. "We have had minimum cooperation from WhatsApp. All the data is controlled in the US and they rarely hand over the data that we request. We don't ask them for content. We only ask for metadata," said another person familiar with the process who declined to be identified.

While the Indian IT Act gives wide-ranging powers to the government to ask for access to encrypted information, very few requests for information, very few requests for information take the legal route. One reason is the long time that it takes to process such requests - on average, over three years - and the other, especially in the case of WhatsApp, is little or no cooperation, according to government officials.

WhatsApp, based in Mountain View, California, did not respond to an email request for comment. The messaging company was acquired by Facebook in 2014.

How security and investigative agencies in India use the data they access is also a grey area. "We do not have a privacy legislation here which will take care of the concerns that people have with respect to use of data. If the government needs to have access to communications, they also need to ensure there are adequate safeguards in place," said Prasanth Sugathan, counsel at Software Freedom Law Centre.

"In practice, end-to-end encryption will bring the end user and the device into focus, rather than WhatsApp or any particular messaging service. This should be a trigger for greater clarity on India's data protection policy," said Arun Mohan Sukumar, who heads the cyber security and internet governance initiative at think tank Observer Research Foundation.

In India, requests for information from companies such as WhatsApp and Google are handled by the Ministry of Home Affairs or the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team. Emails to both were unanswered at the time of going to print.

The Indian government was involved in a long-standing dispute with BlackBerry over access to encrypted data on its messenger and corporate email service. BlackBerry set up servers in Mumbai to comply with local regulations, but said it could not access encrypted data on its enterprise servers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-april-8-2016-neha-alawadhi-daunting-task-ahead-for-investigative-agencies-with-whatsapp-end-to-end-encryption