Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Native: The bigger picture

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:11:57Z

For all our sleek machines, we are slaves to the much larger Internet of Things.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 1, 2018.

There was a time, at the turn of the millennium, when we were trying to cope with the fact that we live with sapient technologies. It was new, to be thinking of cohabitation with things that speak, interact, listen, and act in tandem with us. I still remember the time when the first pagers and cellphones arrived — how difficult it was for people to figure out the social etiquette for living with these devices.

From those early days, we have come a long way. Digital things are everywhere — and we talk to them everywhere and everywhen. On a regular day, our phones are on our dining tables, our devices are buzzing with notifications silently in our pockets, and they are guiding us in our everyday practices. They are not just bringing us information but also listening to us, pre-empting our moves, doing things that we have not even imagined yet. Living with technologies is old — the new normal is living in technologies.

I was recently reminded by a research team that the cars we drive are giant super-computers with engines. That a new car on the roads has more computational processing power than the land-rover on Mars. Our cars are indeed computing devices and we sit in them, depending on a variety of computational processes to keep us safe, as we are hurled at high speeds ahead. Our smart homes, too, are slowly becoming sapient surfaces with specific functions. Microwaves that remember meal times, coffee machines that sense our proximity and start brewing or refrigerators that keep track of our expired food — they are all very basic computing devices that we are already used to.

However, our life is not just with the devices but the immense networks of other devices that they connect with. I got reminded of this very starkly on a recent trip to India, when I realised that the SIM card that I had bought the last time has been deactivated for non-use. At the same time, procuring a new SIM was going to need patience, time and Aadhaar authentication, which won’t happen at the airport. Additionally, there were no wifi hotspots to use in the middle of the night. Thus started the longest night of my life. In that four-hour digital blackout, I found myself thinking of my condition as a state of disconnectedness, of paralysis. I was surrounded by my two phones (don’t ask), my iPad, my laptop, and, armed to the teeth with charging cords and power-banks. Yet, none of them were of any use.

Once disconnected from the cloud that caters to my entertainment and the services that keep me talking, it was as if all my devices were useless. I scrolled through multiple screens and then gave up, resigning myself to looking at others with data, with malignant longing. It was with great shock that I realised that my devices are only gateway machines. Despite all the money and effort I have spent in selecting specific hardware combinations and care equipment, without their capacity to speak to other machines-servers, controllers, nodes — they are almost entirely pointless.

So used am I to instant interaction, reciprocation and feedback with my devices, I forgot that I am actually in conversation with an Internet of Things that far exceeds my immediate intimacy with my personalised screen. Somewhere in there is a powerful reminder of why data protection and security are so critical, but also fragile in the connected Web. Because we can do almost anything that we like to keep our individual devices secure, but the large networks that give them life and animate them are completely out of our control. In the face of this uncontrollable void, the best we can do is hope that things will be safe. And that illusion is not going to last long — in these moments of disconnection, one realises it. Thankfully, before the head got filled with the dark side of digital connectivity, I chanced upon an old movie I had saved on my laptop to show in a class once. It was Wall-E. I decided to just watch that film about a world where the only live thing was a robot, and in some strange way, found it very comforting.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-1-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-bigger-picture

Digital Native: How smart cities can make criminals out of denizens

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:19:23Z

People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 15, 2018.

I first heard about smart cities in 2003. Sitting in India, it seemed to be a very strange concept being developed in the Netherlands, where the planners were trying to arm an entire city with smartness. The idea was that if we deploy enough cameras, devices that see, machines that hear, and data connectivity that envelopes the city in a seamless cloud, it might lead to more order, discipline, and control. To me that felt like a strange experiment because under all of those different imaginations of the city as a neat, organised, controlled environment, were assumptions that were alien to my Indian sensibilities.

It was strange to look at all the promises that “smartness” would deliver — it would make human life easier. It would increase safety and create order out of chaos. It would build new lifestyles that are filled with assistive technologies. In all of these, was the imagination of the city as a laboratory — controlled and efficient, as opposed to riotous and serendipitous. The cities were positioned as filled with intention, so that the interruptions of people, animals, festivals, traffic and crowds would be removed through the deployment of these digital devices and networks. What needed to be preserved was the city and its infrastructure, rather than the individuals and communities that make the city alive and exciting. We wanted our infrastructure to be smart, taking decisions on our behalf, and shaping our lives through the algorithmic protocols that they were coded to embody.

In that faraway time, these had felt like idle speculations. Fifteen years on, I have now come to realise that the biggest motivation for building smart cities was not really facilitating human movement, habitation and habits. Indeed, at the heart of the smart city project was the setting up of a massive surveillance apparatus that would clinically diagnose the unwanted people and processes in the city, and surgically remove them — with the assistance of predictive technologies that would be implemented in policing and planning these city spaces.

Smart cities were not constructed to make people’s lives easier. They were constructed because, increasingly, all the people in a city are imagined as “users”, who need to be instructed through terms of services, how they must behave and live in these city spaces. One of the biggest cultural turns in the massification of the digital web was that almost all users were imagined as potential criminals by the very virtue of them being connected. Internet service providers and regulators knew that if people are connected, they will be violating the law at some point or another, sometimes unknowingly. People download information and share it without knowing about the intellectual property rights. On social media bullying, harassment and hate speech find easy avenues. The largest traffic on the internet is for pornographic and often banned material which finds its audiences on the connected web. Spammers, viruses, hijacked machines, and, often, searches for unexpected items lead people onto the dark web where the questionable human interactions happen frequently.

The introduction of the digital terms of services was essentially to presume that the user was a potential criminal who leases hardware and software, and, platforms from proprietary companies and governments could then control and discipline the user through comprehensive surveillance practices. Construction of smart cities performs a similar function in the physical space. Instead of thinking about citizens as co-owners who shape city spaces, smart cities establish a service level agreement with its occupants, and reduces them to users. Any deviation results in punitive action or devaluation, often curbing the movement, and the rights of belonging to the city spaces.

While it is true that smart technologies can facilitate certain aspects of human life, they depend on unfettered data collection, predictive profiling, correlative algorithms and conditions of extreme invasion and control — which are all predicated on the idea that you will falter. And when you do, the technologies will be there to witness, record, archive, and punish you for the daily transgressions till you are wiped into becoming a predictable, controlled, cleaned up drone that travels in docility across the networked edges of the city. We will be assimilated. Resistance will be futile.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-july-15-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-citys-watching

Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India

sumandro — 2019-03-16T04:33:15Z

This working paper by Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster draws from the field study undertaken by Ritam Sengupta, and is published by the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester. The field study was commissioned by the CIS, with support from the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.

Download the working paper: PDF

Abstract

This paper presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries. It presents a case study of big data innovations in “Stelcorp”; a state electricity corporation in India. In an attempt to address losses in electricity distribution, Stelcorp has introduced new digital meters throughout the distribution network to capture big data, and organisation-wide information systems that store and process and disseminate big data.

Emergent issues are identified across three domains: implementation, value and outcome. Implementation of big data has worked relatively well but technical and human challenges remain. The advent of big data has enabled some – albeit constrained – value addition in all areas of organisational operation: customer billing, fault and loss detection, performance measurement, and planning. Yet US$ tens of millions of investment in big data has brought no aggregate improvement in distribution losses or revenue collection. This can be explained by the wider outcome, with big data faltering in the face of external politics; in this case the electoral politics of electrification. Alongside this reproduction of power, the paper also reflects on the way in which big data has enabled shifts in the locus of power: from public to private sector; from labour to management; and from lower to higher levels of management.

A number of conceptual frameworks emerge as having analytical power in studying big data and global development. The information value chain model helps track both implementation and value-creation of big data projects. The design-reality gap model can be used to analyse the nature and extent of barriers facing big data projects in developing countries. And models of power – resource dependency, epistemic models, and wider frameworks – are all shown as helping understand the politics of big data.

Cross-posted from University of Manchester.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india

We Are All Cyborgs

nishant — 2015-04-24T12:00:54Z

The cyborg reminds us that who we are as human beings is very closely linked with the technologies we use.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on April 29, 2012

If you look at any illustrated history of human civilisation, you will quickly realise that it is also a history of technology. From the discovery of fire by Homo sapiens to the contemporary homo digitalis, there is no escaping that technologies of different kinds have not only changed the way we live but also helped us realise what it means to be human. Often, we treat these technologies as external to us, thinking of them as tools that we deploy to perform a particular task. However, as our technologies become more transparent, intimate and customised, we realise that we are developing relationships with the technological devices that surround us. So, if your laptop crashes, you feel crippled. There are people who proclaim that they feel amputated without their cellphone. It is quite reasonable to feel lost without the information compass of the internet.

This relationship between human beings and technologies has been very concisely defined in the idea of a cyborg. A cyborg is a human-technology synthesis which enhances our capacities to live as human beings. While it might seem like a slightly new idea, once you realise that we constantly live with technologies and often internalise them in our bodies, it is not difficult to wrap our head around it. Think of people with pacemakers or prosthetic limbs or different implants in their bodies, who experience technologies as an integral part of their everyday life. Similarly, think of the wide range of technology apparatus that you depend on to live a “regular” human life. We have also seen iconic cyborg representations in popular movies — from the absolutely unforgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 to our very own dimpled Shah Rukh Khan as Ra.One — there has been a persistent imagining of the human being as we know it, evolving to become some sort of a super man, enhanced by advancements in digital technologies of virtual reality.

There has been a growing anxiety, almost a moral panic, about how technologies are alienating us, replacing face-time with inter-face time so that we are all growing “alone together”. There is also, across generations and users, a growing separation of those who work with technologies and those who don’t. There is much concern about the human becoming corrupt because of the ubiquitous presence of the pervasive and invasive technologies around us. In the face of these anxieties, the cyborg stands as a culturally significant and timely reminder that we, as human beings, are very closely linked with the technologies that we use. And that we need to stop thinking of technologies as merely gadgets and tools that surround us. The different objects that remind us of the presence of technology are not the same thing as technology itself. Technology is a way of thinking about things, a way of relating to the world around us. The most intrinsic forms of technologies are the ones that we don’t even recognise as a part of our innate mental make up.

Do this simple experiment. Right now, while you are reading this, do not look at any clock or time-measuring device and guess what time it is. Chances are that you will be, give or take a few minutes, more or less accurate. Even if you are temporally challenged, you will at least know what part of the day it is, morning, afternoon, evening or night. The point is that we are absolutely and completely creatures of time. We cannot think of ourselves outside of it and even when we might be dramatically wrong about it, there is no escaping the fact that we are always thinking of ourselves and the world around us through time.

We experience our lives and our relationships in cyclical notions of the clock’s face, thinking of our actions as borrowed from the future, lived in the present, and relegated to the archives of the past. It then, must come as a bit of a shock (it certainly did to me, the first time I was made to realise it) that time is not natural. Time is a human way of measuring a passage of actions. Time is a technology which has now become such a potent metaphor of life that we have forgotten to make the separation of the human and the technological.

And thus, whether you might be a tech-savvy digital native or a byte-fearing luddite, there is no denying the idea that when it comes to technologies of time, you are already a natural born cyborg. This ability of technologies to become transparent and an inalienable part of who we are forms cyborgs. The process through which they become transparent is not easily accessible, but it does begin by an internalisation of the technology’s processes in our everyday vocabulary. So the next time you think of yourself as a system that needs to be upgraded, or unable to pay attention because you don’t have enough bandwidth, remember that you are engaging in a flirtatious relationship with the digital. And slowly, but surely, we are all turning into cyborgs, as the new technologies rearrange patterns of our life and living.

digitalnative@expressindia.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:36:29Z

What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by HEIRA: The need for innovative curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.

Peer 2 Peer: One of the observations that was made unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become the call of the day.

Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom, rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a facilitator who builds conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship with the idea of curriculum and teaching.

Reciprocal evaluation: It was pointed out that the grade oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.

Inspired by the Badges contest at HASTAC, it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades. Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of learning.

Role based learning: Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education classroom.

We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.

These initial discussions look at the possibility of innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop

Platforms, Power, and Politics: Perspectives from Domestic and Care Work in India

Aayush Rathi, and Ambika Tandon — 2021-07-07T15:19:37Z

CIS has been undertaking a two-year project studying the entry of digital platforms in the domestic and care work in India, supported by the Association for Progressive Communications as part of the Feminist Internet Research Network. Implemented through 2019-21, the objective of the project is to use a feminist lens to critique platform modalities and orient platformisation dynamics in radically different, worker-first ways. Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi led the research team at CIS. The Domestic Workers’ Rights Union is a partner in the implementation of the project, as co-researchers. Geeta Menon, head of DWRU, was an advisor on the project, and the research team consisted of Parijatha G.P., Radha Keerthana, Zeenathunnisa, and Sumathi, who are office holders in the union and are responsible for organising workers and addressing their concerns.

The Executive Summary for the project report is below.

The full report, ‘Platforms, power, and politics: Perspectives from domestic and care work in India’, can be found here.

The press release can be found here.

Introduction

Paid domestic and care work is witnessing the entry of digital intermediaries over the past decade. More recently, there has been tremendous growth of digital platforms. This holds the potential to impact millions of workers in the sector, which is characterised by a long history of informality and exclusion from rights-according legal frameworks. Digital intermediation of domestic and care work has been a space of high-growth, but also high-attrition. In India, order books of digital platforms providing domestic and care work services were reported to have been growing by upto 60 percent month-on-month in 2016. This is expected to shift the organisation of workers and employment relations profoundly.

Broadly, the discourse on digital platforms providing home-based services can be summarised as follows: proponents argue that digitisation will act as a step towards bringing formalisation to the sector, while critics argue that platforms could replicate the exploitation of workers by further disguising the employer-employee relationship. Similar debates around lack of protections and precarity have also taken place in other occupations in gig work such as transportation and food delivery. In fact, the similarity in precarity and the informal nature of this relationship across gig work and domestic work has led to domestic workers being labelled the original gig workers. Domestic work is a particularly vulnerable and unprotected sector, which makes work in the sector qualitatively different from most other sectors in the gig or sharing economy.

Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aimed to examine the dynamics of platformisation in, and of domestic or reproductive care work. Our hypothesis was that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which could empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different from non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we studied several aspects of the work relationship, including wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms.

Methodology

We borrowed from ethnographic methods and feminist principles to co-design and implement the research tools with grassroots workers and organisers. Between June to November 2019, we conducted 65 in-depth semi-structured interviews primarily in New Delhi and Bengaluru. A majority of these were with domestic workers who were seeking or had found work through platforms. We also did interviews with workers who had found work through traditional placement agencies to compare our findings, and with representatives from platforms, government labour departments, and workers collectives. Of the workers we interviewed, a majority were women, but men were included as well. Interviews in New Delhi were undertaken by CIS, while interviews with workers in Bengaluru were undertaken by grassroots activists in Bengaluru, affiliated with the Domestic Workers Rights Union (DWRU).

In implementing the data collection approach, we employed feminist methodological principles of intersectionality, self-reflexivity, and participation. The methodology draws on standpoint theory, which encourages knowledge production that centres the lived experiences of marginalised groups. We were acutely aware of our own positionality as high income, Savarna researchers studying a sector dominated by Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi women from low income groups. This power differential was softened partially by involving DWRU through the course of the project. Workers across both field sites were also interviewed in spaces familiar to them, most often their homes, in languages that they were comfortable with including Hindi, Kannada, and Tamil.

Feminist principles also instrumental during the data analysis, with focus on intersectionality and self-reflexivity. We highlighted the ways in which inequalities of gender, income, migration status, caste, and religion are replicated and amplified in the platform economy. In particular, we discussed the impact of the digital gender gap in access and skills on workers’ ability to find economic opportunities.

Findings

Our typology of platforms mediating domestic work finds three types of platforms – (i) marketplace, or platforms that list workers’ data on their profile, provide certain filters for automated selection of a pool of workers, and charge a fee from customers for access to workers’ contact details, (ii) digital placement agency, or platforms that provide an end-to-end placement service to customers, identify appropriate workers on the basis of selection criteria, and negotiate conditions of work on behalf of workers, and (iii) on-demand platforms, or companies that provide services or ‘gigs’ such as cleaning on an hourly basis, performed by a roster of workers who are characterised as ‘independent contractors’.

When it comes to the role played by platforms in determining employment relations, there is a wide variation within and across platform categories. There are both weak and strong models of intervention. On one end of the spectrum are marketplaces, with minimal intervention in the recruitment process, and on the other on-demand platforms, that exact control over each aspect of work. Digital platforms reconfigure the conception of intermediaries in the domestic work sector, functioning as next-generation placement agencies. All three platform types contain aspects that provide workers agency, as well as those that reinforce their positions of low-power. Platform design impacts the role platforms play in setting conditions of work, but does not determine it entirely.

(Re)shaping the terms of work
Across the three types of platforms, wages are slightly higher than or matching those of workers off platforms. Some marketplace platforms have incorporated features to nudge customers towards setting higher wages, such as enforcing minimum wage standards, or informing customers of expected wages in their locality. Conversely, on-demand platforms charge a high rate of commission from workers, despite refusing to recognise them as employees. This indicates that this is a misclassification of an employment relationship, given that workers are unable to set their own conditions or wages for work. Despite the high rates of commission and appropriation of labour by platforms, on-demand workers earn higher wages than workers on other platforms. The relatively high wage is a result of marketing on-demand cleaning as professionalised and more skilled than day-to-day cleaning. Tasks in the sector continue to be distributed along the lines of gender and caste, as has historically been the case. Dalit, Bahujan and Adivasi women are more likely to take up work such as cleaning and washing dishes, while men and women across castes are equally distributed in cooking work. Women dominate tasks such as elderly and childcare, as in the traditional economy. Workers in professionalised tasks such as deep cleaning that requires technical equipment and chemicals are almost entirely men.

Digital divides and workers’ agency
We find that workers are primarily onboarded onto platforms by learning about it from other workers, through onboarding camps held by platforms, or offline advertising by platforms. Such in-person onboarding techniques allows workers with no digital access or literacy to register themselves on marketplace platforms and digital placement agencies.

However, we find that low levels of education and digital literacy continue to impact platformed labour by creating a strong informational asymmetry between workers and platforms. For instance, we find that women workers from low income communities have very little information about how platforms work, causing deep distrust. Workers with digital devices and literacy (and therefore a relatively better understanding of the functionality of the platform), physical mobility and the resources to bear indirect costs that were outsourced to them were at a significant advantage in finding better-paying jobs. Workers who were seeking flexibility and were not necessarily dependent on the platform for their primary income were also better placed than those entirely dependent on platforms. Women workers tended to be disadvantaged on all these counts, limiting their agency and capacity to reap the benefits of the platform economy.

Across the three types of platforms, systems of placement and ratings add to the information asymmetry, as workers are not aware of the impact of ratings on their ability to find work or charge better wages. Ratings and filtering systems also hard-code the impact of workers’ social characteristics on their work. Workers are unable to exercise control over their data, further undermining their agency vis-a-vis platforms and employers. We identify a clear need for collective bargaining structures to protect workers’ rights, although platformed domestic workers remained distant from both domestic work unions and emergent unions of platform workers in other sectors.

Intersectionalities of formalisation
We find that inequalities of caste, class, and gender that have historically shaped the sector continue to be replicated or even amplified in the platform economy. What remains clear is that platforms in the domestic work sector adopt the logics of this sector, more than the converse. Platformisation is conflated with formalisation, and it is within this vector, from complete informality to piecemeal formalisation, that platforms operate. Labour benefits do not take the form of labour protections or welfare entitlements that are the central function of formalisation processes. Instead, the so-called benefits are intended to transform domestic workers to participate within the logics and vagaries of the market.

Policy Recommendations

Recognise and implement labour protections for domestic workers
Domestic workers have historically occupied the most vulnerable positions in the workforce, with limited legal protections. Exposed to the regulatory grey areas that platforms operate in, this doubly exposes domestic workers to precarious conditions of work. Despite an avowed move towards formalisation of domestic work, platform-mediated labour continues to retain characteristics of informal labour, even heightening some.

If pushed to do so, platform companies can be instrumental in resolving some of the implementation challenges that governments have faced in enforcing legislative protections sought to be made available to domestic workers. Platforms have databases of workers, which can be used to mandatorily register them for social security schemes offered by the government. This data can also be used for better policy making, in the absence of reliable statistics particularly on migrant workers in the informal economy.

Reduce the protective gap between employment and self-employment
The (mis)classification of “gig” work within labour law frameworks is still a matter that continues to be hotly debated within policy practitioners, legal scholarship, and civil society actors. Three positions, in particular, have been taken—treating gig workers as employees, independent contractors, or occupying a third intermediate category. More recently, there have been some legal victories guaranteeing employment protections and increasing platform companies’ accountability. However, these successes have been more visible in Global North jurisdictions.

Regardless of the resolution of these ongoing debates over employment status, labour frameworks should provide some universal protections to all categories of labour. Such protections must include universal coverage of social security, in addition to rights such as freedom of association, collective bargaining, equal remuneration and anti-discrimination. Policies geared towards achieving this objective would be significant in reducing the protective gaps between different categories of labour, and would particularly help historical and emerging occupational categories of workers such as “gig” workers and domestic workers.

Recognise the specific challenge(s) and potential of platformisation of domestic work
Platforms hold the potential of acting as effective facilitators in informal labour markets. Even when they do not replace existing recruitment pathways, they provide alternate ones. Workers were more likely to register on a platform if they were entering the domestic work labour market recently (often distress and migration driven), or had not enjoyed success with informal, word-of-mouth networks. However, platforms also heighten labour market insecurities, and create new ones. These potential risks need to be specifically recognised through appropriate frameworks, such as social security, discrimination law and data protection.

Tailor policy-making to platform models
We identify three types of platforms, each of which intervene to varying degrees in the work relationship. We recommend that digital placement agencies and marketplace platforms be registered with governments and enforce basic protections for workers such as provision of minimum wage, preventing abuse (including non-payment of wages) and trafficking. On-demand companies on the other hand, must be treated as employers, and workers be accorded employment protections including social security.

In addition to rights-based policy actions, legal-regulatory mechanisms geared towards mitigating the precariousness of platform-based work are required. This can take the shape of clarifying and expanding existing legal-regulatory formulations, or preparing new ones. Such policy making should factor in the power and information asymmetry between domestic workers (and gig workers, generally) and platforms.

Further, in the absence of health or retirement benefits, risks and indirect costs of operations are shifted from employers to workers. For instance, workers provide capital in the form of tools or equipment, support the fluctuation of business and income, and can be ‘deactivated’ from an application as a result of poor ratings or periods of inactivity. Any regulation aiming to extend employee status should mandate platforms to support such indirect costs.

Related Publications

1. Research notes with reflections from union members.
2. The event report from a stakeholder consultation with workers, unions, companies and government representatives.
3. A reflection note on the participatory approach taken by the project.
4. A paper with a comparative analysis of the policy landscape on domestic work in the platform economy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platforms-power-and-politics-perspectives-from-domestic-and-care-work-in-india

Staying silent about cyberbullying is no longer an option

nishant — 2019-07-02T03:52:22Z

Cyberbullying is the dangerous new normal.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on June 16, 2019.

I found myself in three very different contexts these last couple of weeks, bound together by a normalising of cyberbullying. The first was a conversation with a professor, who had punished a group of students in her class for disruptive behaviour involving their cellphones. As a form of retaliation, they photoshopped her face in a set of pornographic and explicitly profane images and made her into a meme. In the course of a week, many others piled on to this viral phenomenon, and the professor was now suddenly finding her private information, and her face being shared and commented on in ways that she could not control or process. When the four students responsible for the first meme were identified and questioned, their first reaction was that they couldn’t understand what the problem was. “This is what everybody does these days,” was their first collective response. While they were punished and made to recognise their crime, the images of this professor are here to stay on multiple social media sites, with more people sharing them faster than they can be removed.

In a very different setting, one of my friends, who has an 11-year-old son, called me frantically, because she found a steady stream of abusive messages on her son’s phone, targeted at him. These messages were on a closed-group social media platform consisting of students from his school. Her son, apparently, had reported some other kids bullying on the school ground and the chastised bullies had taken to tormenting him online. Calls to the school, inquiries from the principal, attempts at mediating and reconciliation had all fallen on deaf ears. When my friend suggested that her son get off the platform, he was in tears, and adamant that his social life will be over and he has to just stay on, and pay his dues. “Everybody has to pay for what they did. This will also get over,” he said, justifying the bullying and mob attacks that he was being subjected to.

On Reddit channels, I witnessed a furious fight about the suicide of Dr Payal Salman Tadvi — the medical doctor who gave in to depression and, eventually, death, after being bullied by three senior doctors who decided that her caste origins offended their professional sensibilities. The thread was started to talk about caste-based discrimination in contemporary Indian workspaces. It was soon taken over by people using this incident to call people of different castes weak, low-willed, and entitled snowflakes, who could not take hardship because they have been coddled by affirmative action. The irony of this argument aside, the one thing that they kept on insisting was that this act of bullying was not about caste at all because “everybody gets bullied and they have to be strong to fight back” or there is no hope for survival.

In all of these three very different cases, scattered around three different continents and privileges, one thing stands out. Cyberbullying is not just here but it seems to have been naturalised and accepted as the new normal. Thus, instead of stopping these acts, the focus seems to be on helping people cope with it. Similarly, the efforts are directed not at calling out such acts, but at supporting victims to see it through, without any structural respite.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-16-2019-staying-silent-about-cyberbullying-is-no-longer-an-option

Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People

nishant — 2017-07-05T17:04:23Z

We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 24, 2017.

The first time I encountered an internet shutdown was in 2009. I was a visiting researcher at the Shanghai University and I received a computer which had default web-filtering software installed on it. My already restricted access to the web was intensified by the Chinese government shutting down the internet as a response to riots in the north-western province of Xinjiang. My connections to friends and families back home were disrupted. It took me three days to figure out how to circumvent the ban using proxy-servers and anonymisers, which cloaked my physical location. I could then send out a message that reassured everyone that all was fine.

During those two weeks of shutdown, I realised, for the first time, how fragile our digital ecosystems are and how completely without ownership our digital transactions. We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions. In those romantic days, when I still believed that the digital promise of connectivity implied free and open public spaces for different voices to be heard and counted, it came as quite a shock to realise that the web is a contested and a controlled space. During my stay in China, once I figured out the work-arounds for these shutdowns, I spent the rest of my research time volunteering to create safe, open networks that allowed people in Shanghai, especially my students, to access the digital space. I used to take pride in the fact that, despite all our troubles in India, the internet shall remain free and that the Indian government would not compromise what is a constitutional right for free speech and expression. I remember joking that in India, the only reason I had internet shutdown was because of power outage or the incompetency of my service provider.

However, the last few years, and especially 2017, have taken away that false sense of faith and pride I had in our nation’s commitment to securing public voices of dissent, protest, and expression. The Human Rights Watch has reported that while we are just half-way into the year, the state governments in India have imposed 20 temporary internet shutdowns so far. These arbitrary, unplanned, ad hoc and reactive shutdowns have been marked as violations of India’s obligations under the international human rights law. The right to be connected is one of the new generation of basic rights available to citizens in a functioning democracy. While one can partially sympathise with the state’s argument that the shutdown was intended to crack down on rumours and hate speech instigating violence, there is no denying that these draconian measures cannot be justified by this empty rhetoric of security.

If anything, research has shown that shutting down communication channels in times of conflict encourages speculation and rumour because people no longer have access to verifiable news sources. When an internet shutdown is imposed, speculation, rampant misinformation, and credible untruths can contribute to a feeling of insecurity, danger, and knee-jerk action, which can precipitate mass violence. Especially for people who are already living precarious lives, the condition of being disconnected is severe because if they do come under attack, they no longer have any respite for urgent and immediate help. Analysis, over a period of time, has shown that the shutdown of the internet is not in the interest of keeping people safe but in the service of keeping authorities unaccountable for their actions. A suspension of all telecommunication services essentially provides the authoritarian powers an escape valve, where they are able to continue their actions, often violent, with impunity and without a sense of responsibility.

Internet shutdowns are not just about means of control but about exercising power, reminding the people in the digital commons who is in charge. It is also a sign of a crumbling apparatus of democracy, where the voice of the citizen, instead of being celebrated in the public, is seen as a problem which has to be solved. Internet shutdowns also have a clear identification of which kinds of voices should not be heard and, indeed, what can and cannot be said under restrictive conditions. Eventually, they discriminate against specific kinds of bodies — marked by identity characteristics — and leads to pathologisation and punishment of people who question the status quo. It is shameful for us that even as we dream digital, we are inching closer to the side of undemocratic demagogues rather than building robust telecommunication networks that enable the true potential of public participation and democratic governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-24-2017-digital-native-on-mute-the-voice-of-the-people

July 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-08-23T02:03:19Z

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
In an article published in the Huffington Post on July 1, 2017, Nirmita Narasimhan stated that imposing taxes on assistive devices is unfair. It is unconscionable that disability aids and assistive technology are considered a luxury and taxed at a higher rate than rough semi-precious stones or cashew nuts. A research paper on patent working requirements and complex products in India authored by Prof Jorge L. Contreras, University of Utah, and Rohini Lakshané, CIS has been accepted for publication in the Jindal Global Law School Law Review 2017. Negotiators from 16 countries met in Hyderabad for discussing a free trade agreement titled Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. Anubha Sinha along with Arul George Scaria reported this in an article published by Live Law.in. Supreme Court of India while dismissing an appeal by the Indian Reprographic Rights Organization ruled that there was no copyright infringement and no licence was required since the activities fell under the education exception in Indian copyright law. In an article published by EIFL, Anubha Sinha discusses the judgment and what it means for access to educational materials in India. Odia Wikipedians, in conjunction with Indian Athletics Federation and Sports and Youth Services collaborated to document the 2017 Asian Athletics Championships. Hundreds of photos were uploaded and new Wikipedia content added to inform the event’s fans, wrote Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu in a blog post. As recently as May 27, 2016, the General Data Protection Regulation (REGULATION (EU) 2016/679 was adopted The Data Protection Directive (1995/46/EC) will be replaced by this Regulation. It is expected that under this Regulation data privacy will be strengthened. Aditi Chaturvedi analyses the developments in a report.

CIS in the news:

UIDAI declining multiple requests by police to share Indian citizens’ biometrics (Justin Lee; Biometrics; July 4, 2017).
Act now to protect yourself against future ransomware attacks (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; July 5, 2017).
Reliance Jio data leaked on website : report (Livemint; July 10, 2017).
Supreme Court sets up constitution bench to hear Aadhaar privacy issues (Priyanka Mittal; Livemint; July 12, 2017).
Centre to form panel to 'encrypt' MGNREGA-DBT database and prevent leaks (Sanjeeb Mukherjee; Business Standard; July 14, 2017).
Calls for law change after Indians left in dark over data leaks (Rahul Bhatia and Sankalp Phartiyal; Reuters; July 14, 2017).
Indians Call For More Stringent Data Protection Laws (PYMTNS; July 17, 2017).
Social Activist Alleges Threat By Police Officer Over Possession of Aadhaar (Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar; Wire; July 16, 2017).

Aadhaar privacy: Key issues that all Aadhaar card holders should bear in mind (Business Today, July 19, 2017).
Data in the open makes it easy for cyber criminals (Kiran Parashar KM; New Indian Express; July 26, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).
Course Packs for Education Ruled Legal in India (Anubha Sinha; EIFL; July 12, 2017).
Digital native: Not only words (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 16, 2017).
Aadhar: Privacy is not a unidimensional concept (Amber Sinha; Economic Times; July 23, 2017).
RCEP IP Chapter: A Serious Threat to Access to Knowledge/ Cultural Goods? (Arul George Scaria and Anubha Sinha; July 27, 2017).
Digital native: Ever on the go (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 30, 2017).

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Article

Why GST Is A Step Backward For The Disabled (Nirmita Narasimhan; Huffington Post; July 1, 2017).

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Pervasive Technologies and Copyright

Research Paper

Patent Working Requirements and Complex Products: An Empirical Assessment of India's Form 27 Practice and Compliance (Jorge L. Contreras and Rohini Lakshané; SSRN and Jindal Global Law School Review; July 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

19th RCEP Meeting (Organized by Ministry of Commerce, Government of India; July 17 - 28, 2017; Hyderabad). Anubha Sinha participated in the meeting.

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Note: The events were organized earlier but reports were published in July 2017:

Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Internship (Manasa Rao and Ananth Subray; July 5, 2017).
Christ University Wikipedia Education Program Faculty Orientation Report (Ananth Subray; July 7, 2017).
How It Came To Be: Wiki Loves Uniformed Services (Krishna Chaitanya Velaga; July 10, 2017).
Tallapaka Pada Sahityam is now on Wikisource (Pavan Santhosh; July 10, 2017).
Thematic Edit-a-thon at Yashawantrao Chavan Institute of Science, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; July 11, 2017).
Asian Athletics Championships 2017 Edit-a-thon (Sailesh Patnaik and Jnanaranjan Sahu; July 31, 2017).

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

Data Protection: Understanding the General Data Protection Regulation (Aditi Chaturvedi; July 4, 2017).

Participation in Event

IViR Summer Course on Privacy Law and Policy (Organized by the University of Amsterdam; July 3 - 7, 2017; Amsterdam). Amber Sinha attended the course.

►Free Speech and Expression and Cyber Security

Participation in Events

OHD on Consultation Paper on Net Neutrality (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.
UNESCO Multistakeholder consultation at 8th Asia Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum (APrIGF) (Organized by UNESCO; Bangkok; July 26 - 29, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Vidhushi Marda also participated in the event.
Cybersecurity Workshop: Spotlight On GCCS 2017 (Organized by Global Partners Digital (GPD) and the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi, in collaboration with Digital Empowerment Foundation, Digital Asia Hub and Open Net Korea; Bangkok; July 25 - 27, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker. Udbhav Tiwari and Vidushi Marda participated in the event.

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Participation in Event

Workshop on Public Open Wi-Fi Pilot (Organized by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India; July 25, 2017). Pranesh Prakash was a speaker.

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Event Organized

Dr. Prerna Prabhakar - Impact of Digitisation of Land Records in Rural India (CIS, New Delhi; July 7, 2017).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2017-newsletter

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:47:27Z

The emergence of digital humanities as a new field of interdisciplinary research enquiry has also seen growth in literature around the problem of its definition. This blog-post lays out some of the conceptual frameworks for the mapping exercise taken up by CIS to look at digital humanities in India.

The ‘digital turn’ has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

The question of what is digital humanities has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of digital humanities – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the ‘digital’ itself as integral to humanistic enquiry. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions for the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s of digital humanities. David Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that ‘what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities.’[1]

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme at CIS:

The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the ‘Nature of the book’, ‘any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another”[2]The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this ‘technologised history’ of the humanities. Can the digital humanities therefore be an attempt to bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here.
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with digital humanities practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core digital humanities concerns, they are not all ‘digital humanists’ or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not digital humanities – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most digital humanities research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in digital humanities – where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno -social subject[3] as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.
Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and digital humanities. This comes with the perception of digital humanities being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities to reinvent themselves by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. Digital humanities has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching digital humanities as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of digital humanities in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying the digital humanities works with or tries to address this particular formulation of the digital humanities.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on digital humanities still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says “Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others.”[4]

The digital humanities then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates digital humanities from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of digital humanities.

This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

[1]. Dave Parry “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ) http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24

[2]. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp.3

[3]. For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial subject: cities, cyborgs and cyberspace Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository@Inflibnet, Web, March 7, 2014.

[4]. Latour, Bruno . "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means." Trans. Couze Venn Theory Culture Society . (2002): 247-260. Sage. Web, March 4, 2014 URL> http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities

Reaping the Benefits of Gamification

dipali — 2015-10-24T14:24:55Z

As a part of the Making Change blog-post series, in this post we will identify a new technique: gamification. This technique is being used for sustainable environment conservation by modern day change-makers. We interview two out of three co-founders of Reap benefit- Kamal Raj and Gautam Prakash who believe in the adoption of more sustained environmental practices that induce social change towards conserving the environment.

CHANGE-MAKER: Kamal Raj,Gautam Prakash and Kuldeep Dantewadia
 
ORGANISATION: Reap Benefit 

METHOD OF CHANGE: Gamification and Human centric systems for consistent behavior change towards better waste-water-energy management. 

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Building a new era of environmentally conscious youth in India through technology and an interdisciplinary approach to change.

We depend on the environment and the resources that it provides us, but surprisingly we are unaware of the effects of its depletion and the need to save these resources. A few of the problems that people now face are with resources like- water,waste and energy because we do not acknowledge the fact that we are wasting them unconsciously. This only triggers the need for more and more solutions which would change the way people perceive the resources and realize the need to conserve. While trying to start an initiative to come up with some solutions to manage these resources, we are approached by the question of the accessibility, affordability and sustainability of those solutions. The solutions and the practice of that solution is a two-way process for any sustainable making-change initiative.

In this post I will be introducing to you Reap Benefit and the technique of Gamification. I will bring out a comparative analysis of the various definitions by renowned gaming authorities across the world who are involved in the process of using games in non-game contexts to bring out change in the offline space. Only after this, will I be acknowledging the importance of the strategies used by Reap Benefit for making these solutions sustainable. The strategies will be- human centric solutions and gamification. Then, I will bring out the connection between these two strategies to provide you an inter-disciplinary understanding of the making change process. Next, these strategies will be coupled with the discussion on the use of technology to speed-up the process. Also, throughout this post we will be referring to the blog- Methods of Social Change written by Denisse Albornoz and we will also make an attempt to answer the questions- 'Who,Where,How' of this making change project in relation to Reap Benefit. The blog post can be accessed here.

Before the journey of the post, I would like you to read this little success story narrated by Kamal Raj in the interview that led Reap benefit a step higher in its aim for making change:

Reap benefit went to a school which received only 400 litres of water supply a day resulting in poor health and care conditions. This water would be used for washing their plates after the mid-day meal and also for sanitation systems. This would only make the place a platform for water, food and breeding mosquitoes all together. Since the students usually consumed food with their right hand, while taking the plate to wash it, they would leave the plates at one side; they would open the tap with their left hand, would take their plates again and start washing them. During this time interval, they would waste a lot of water.

As, a solution to this, Reap Benefit changed the taps which would discharge 60% less of water. They also created a clean water purification system. Now, with the same 400 litres of water, students washed their plates and adopted better sanitation practices. The challenges that they faced actually made them innovate better systems for remarkable change.

Think about these questions for a minute..

Does this story relate to physical needs?
Does this story relate to creative problem solving?
Is it a story that brings out better affordable solutions?
With this solution were the students benefited?
Was this a successful idea?

Reap Benefit

First of all, take a look at a brief introduction of Reap Benefit given by Kamal Raj:

Kamal: "Reap Benefit works to implement affordable solutions, enabling quantifiable waste-water-energy management systems, as a way to facilitate behavioural change by engaging the head, hand and heart of the user. Having worked with many people, we have realized that behaviour modification allows for more sustained adoption of environment sustainability practices. We take them through a 4-stage behavioural change process – ‘Unconsciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Wrong’, ‘Consciously Right’ and ‘Unconsciously Right’ (we will understand this process later in the post). A link to the website is here- Reap Benefit."

Reap Benefit is bound together by the deep concern for the environment they have and the dead-lock issues that it faces. They aim for affordable solutions with maximum impact in the least time. Kamal marks that they work only with the students within the age group 10-16, because the use gamification is most effective in this age group. Also, he makes an addition to that by saying the rewards the older age groups demand are not as easy-to-meet as those of the age group they work with. It also aims to co-create experiences by working hands on with the youth: their target audience for creating change.

It is said that the more you practice the better you get. By this, I would like to introduce you to the concept of quotidian activism. Reap Benefit deeply believes in this concept. But, what does quotidian activism mean? A working definition is: the form of activism occurring everyday. This form of activism may lead to people making actions sustainable and achieve consistent behavioural change, supported by products and innovations provided by Reap Benefit (later in this post, I will introduce you to some of these innovations).

Finally, Reap Benefit highly focuses on the need to answer the ‘why’ behind the problem. This answer would provide a more personal understanding of the problem for creating change. By engaging the participant with the 'why', he will also be able to evaluate the impact and the benefits of his actions, take ownership of the problem and comprehend the need for innovation.

What is 'change' for Reap Benefit?

Presuming every organization has its own design to making change, Reap Benefit's understands it in the following way:

Gautam: “Change for us is a very sub-conscious part of your life. (It is also a) two stage process- knowledge: which will tell us we need solution and the solution. The knowledge will tell you that you are unconsciously doing the wrong thing. Then when you realize it, you go to a stage of consciously wrong. When you keep doing this you reach a stage when you know that you are consciously doing right, and soon, you are doing it every single day and then you unconsciously do it.”

I will attempt to understand their process of change by adding that this 'to be good' drive in the individual or the need for public approval is what makes them do unconsciously right everyday, and then it is only the last stage what makes it a habit. Gautam also mentions that each of these stages has an impact of its own and altogether, they become more powerful. This change process will lead to sustainable change according to him.

We have seen the change agents that are vital to create change, but how is this change executed? In the next section we will look at two strategies used for making change: gamification and human-centred design and later, we will only try to produce a connection between them.

Discovering Gamification

In this section, we will unpack the first part of the 'how' question. First of all, we will compare the various definitions of the technique given by people involved in understanding the use of game elements in the non-game contexts, to create change in the emotional and social behaviour of people. The definitions of these three people in the big list of so-called gamification authorities will be used provides us with keywords for a comparative understanding of what the technique means. These three people are:

JANE McGONIGAL: She is an American game designer and author who advocates the use of mobile and digital technology to channel positive attitudes and collaboration in a real world context.

GABE ZICHERMANN: He is an author, public speaker, and self-described "serial entrepreneur." He has worked as a proponent of leveraging game mechanics in business, education, and other non-entertainment platforms to increase user engagement through gamification.

JESSE SCHELL: He is an American video game designer an acclaimed author, CEO of Schell Games and a Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Entertainment Technology.

Definitions

JANE McCONIGAL	GABE ZICHERMANN	JESSE SCHELL
“It is a blissful productivity acquired by the flourishing feeling, that is, accomplishments in a game but only with a volunteering attribute of the participant.”	“Games are the only force in the universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest in a predictable way without using force.”	“It is a problem solving situation that you enter into because you want to.”

I would be like to bring points of intersections between these three definitions.

VOLUNTEERING ATTRIBUTE VS. USE OF FORCE: The volunteering attribute is an efficient way to foster sustainable participation, as opposed to the use of force which makes a campaign less appealing.
PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS: Games are a very responsive way of trying to accomplish problem solving as the person is engaged with the problem and willing to solve it.
PRODUCTIVITY: There problem solving skills leads the participant to a desired outcome.

These points also give you a clear understanding of Reap Benefit who works along the same lines with the volunteer or participant to solve the problem of conservation.
But, does the usage of games actually produce behavioral change? If so, how do games provide this function? These are some of the questions we will try and attempt to answer in the next section.

Games as a Tool to Influence Behaviour

Playing games results in obtaining rewards in some form of the other. These rewards psychologically induce a positive emotional feeling in the participant. When the participant learns something through games and when that emotional feeling arises, he tries and incorporates the same solutions in the games to solving the real life problems. This brings out an improved result and problem solving ability. But what about the affordability of that solution? We need to understand ways to make it affordable because any task once done will not induce consistency in the behavior change. But the task repeated many times will improve or change the behavior over a long period of time. So, when the question of affordability (financial fear) is answered then the emotional feeling primarily can bring out change in the behavior of the individual. (Yongwen Xu, 2011).

There are also some game mechanics that are to be kept in mind to change behavior while designing games apart from just the element of fun and affordability. So, we will now look at another authority involved in gamification in the upcoming section to explore these mechanics. We will also try and understand these mechanics in relation to Reap Benefit.

Game Mechanics

Seth Priebatsch is the creator of SCVNGR and LevelUp social gaming sites. He has provided a list of game mechanics which could be necessary to understand games and why they produce particular changes for a better environment. These are:

Appointment Dynamics: to bring players to do something at a pre-defined time and place.

Influence and status: any participant or group that is involved in the change-making process, is influenced by the presence of others because of the competition and the envy that leads them to carry forward the task

Progression Dynamics: the success of the student is measured through the tasks by giving rewards.

Communal Discovery: the entire group or community works towards making change.

Seth's model could be applied to the process of creating change that Reap Benefit uses, and this is illustrated through their experience of a student-run energy audit in the field. A set of students were assigned the task of doing an audit for the energy conservation and the energy usage of a Puma store. They were just given the base for the audit but the criteria for the audit was planned by them. The students were encouraged by the thought of getting rewards for the task. Kamal recalls that they had used games to make the children understand it.

Relating this to Seth's Model, the children were given a pre-defined time and place for doing the task and were influenced both, by the element of competition between the students and also the idea of receiving a reward once the task is completed. The task only ends by obtaining a sense of communal discovery that, all together they can make change on a personal and team level. We understood Seth's model but we will try and comprehend deeper, the use of rewards for inducing behavioral change in the next section.

Rewards Mechanism

Kamal commented on Reap Benefit's 2-3 months periodic reward mechanism. He believes that this makes students equal in position before starting every task.

Kamal: "We use a lot of things like rewards to motivate them to play a game (with us) and we personalize all these rewards based on the questionnaire that we do at the beginning where we subtly understand what they like."

This information which gives ideas of how to encourage each student to get the best performance out of them.

a) Extrinsic rewards: The extrinsic reward here, for example would be allotting points to various participants/ teams. Michael Wu, a chief scientist in subjects like digital technologies, says extrinsic rewards are like a jump start to intrinsic rewards.Once the student acknowledges them, they acquire a sense of ownership and innovation and are empowered to create new solutions. Hence, awareness is not created before the task but an output from the task.

Refer to Gabe Zichermann's video for more on the importance of gamification and the rewards mechanism.

b) Intrinsic rewards: Apart from producing behavior change, gamification's can also indicate learning. One of the elements that facilitates learning would be:

Player Control: A participant will have certain amount of control while gaming which would lead to a sense of responsibility and accomplishment. Learning could be intrinsic only if there is responsibility of gaining a reward through a task.

There are many other elements that produce learning and they could be accessed here.

Human-Centric Model

Human-centred systems aim to preserve or enhance human skills, in both manual and office work, in environments in which technology tends to undermine the skills that people use in their work.

We will now answer the second part of the 'how' question and show another strategy for making change. Human centric systems do not use machines to create solutions to the problems but rather design the game with the importance of the 'user-friendly' element. This has been explored in a past post by Denisse. Access it here.

Reap Benefit's ‘transparent dustbin’ is a great model to illustrate this. The dustbin is transparent for people to see and then throw the waste in according to different types of waste. It is kept at an eye-level so that the waste already thrown inside can help the person perceive and throw his waste in the exact dustbin and to make it easily accessible for the public.

These human-centric approaches provide a consistent change in the behaviour of the individual because the method is user-friendly and make segregation easy. The objectives is to engage in unconscious behavioural change. The transparent dustbin is better explained by this audio byte of Kamal Raj:

Another innovation of Reap Benefit, is the compose mixture

Kamal says: "The idea was to throw something with it, like the degrade compost product we innovated and the waste would compost, without smell, without taking 3 months."

This mix, by giving visual feedback could be accessible by anyone due to its low cost and easy-to-use method. So, these innovations justify and explain the benefits of human centric models and also produce many new ideas in the minds of the students( James,2010). I would like to explain this by a chain of ideas that arise while segregating plastic and non-plastic waste.

The participation in the structure (waste segregation model)

The negatives of the model (harmful effects of mixing plastic in the model)

Realizing the need for another mechanism (dustbins for different types of waste)

Another idea to support the new mechanism (dustbins should be transparent and named)

The need to spread this (start campaigning for the system)

Explaining this model in brief: the waste segregation model is the segregation of plastic and other waste. During this process the three ideas that arise are: a) the harmful effects of plastic, b) the need for a plastic waste dustbin and a non-plastic waste dustbin, and the last one, b) the transparency of the dustbin. Then the major question of spreading the model by using technology arises. This would be the model thought by the participant during the discussion of the usage of technology for sustainability.

But what is sustainability and how is it important? Complementing the technique of gamification and the human- centric approaches with technology to make it a sustainable solution is a challenge. This system may be adopted by all. But the aftermath of implementing this apparatus is a challenging question. In the next section we will comprehend the role of technology adding a more positive result to Reap benefit.

The Role of Technology and Media

This section will look at how Reap Benefit uses technology and media and then try and understand how the use of technology can make these solutions sustainable.

Kamal: "There are two aspects that are already existing- knowledge and the products. So, when someone starts the journey, technology enables us to be with them in this journey without us being there. Without the sharing of photos through digital media like facebook, keeping track of the journey would not be possible. We need technology to bridge the gap."

Information access is facilitated by the use of technology and digital media or social networking, as they share the systems with their online community. But, when this access is denied the only solution is to be a part of the in-tutor system and realize the positives of the same through experience. Technology takes Reap Benefit a step higher in its aim to make sustainable change by targeting youth, the main users of social network platforms.

Making Change

We started this post with an introduction to a very strong initiative- Reap Benefit. Techniques such as gamification and human-centric systems are used effectively by this organization to create maximum benefits. It focuses highly on the use of these strategies to induce behaviour modification in youth. We attempted to build a relationship between these techniques to answer whether they are sustainable, intelligible and accessible solutions to making change.

Summing up the 'WHO,WHERE AND HOW' question- We have only understood that, to use the opportunity and take charge before others do so, we need a 3-stage plan. We understood that the WHO means the target, the change agents who will lead the initiative and comprehend the need for change by themselves. The question of WHERE focuses on the idea of making change in the public space rather than in the private sphere which limits the extent of the change. We have summarized this only by bringing out the importance of technology to make change the largest priority of youth. The question of HOW is understood in this post by the use to affordable solutions.

The problems faced by the environment call for solutions that are affordable and accessible. These two qualities of the solution would only make it sustainable.These solutions are met by various game elements in a game and the human centric approaches that engage the individual in problem solving by disseminating knowledge to them and informing them about the problems. This makes those solutions to problem-solving evaluatable through quantity and the quality of the result of the problem. Behavior change will be only possible by solutions that break the existing schemas in the society and create new innovations. (James,2010). Now, through sustainable, innovative solutions through these techniques we can make the dream of a clear and clean environment a reality.

While this blog may help you gain a positive understanding about gamification it would certainly lead you to many more questions. In this digital age, we would surely have to ‘re-game-think’ the methodologies for change again and agai,n not only in terms of using unique techniques such as gamification but also in terms of accessibility of such techniques for change in the structural divisions in society.

Footnotes

Reward is one of the elements that drives the individual to adopt the gamification technique- the reward/feedback mechanism. You can acquire a profound reading on more of these elements that leads to further making-change here- http://www.yukaichou.com/.
A few more elements like the player control and communal discovery that indicates learning through Gamification could be found here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
More information on persuasive messages, strategies for changing behavior, rules for effective delivery, and how to manage the participants/audience in the making change initiative can be found-http://sustainability.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Promoting_Sustain_Behavior_Primer.pdf
To hear a talk show of Yukaichou on TEDx about Gamification- check it here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Qjuegtiyc
To hear another talk show of Gabe Zichermann on TEDx about Gamification- check here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2N-5maKZ9Q
The process of creating sustainability through gamification and technology, according to Rachel James, goes as follows:

Attracting attention by breaking the existing schemas (mental structures of preconceived idea, Jean Piaget,1926) This can be done by creating a mystery for them and then involving the individual in complex thought processing to change the schema. Story-telling could also induce emotional reactions to inspire or simulate them.
Persuade them through gamification
Make the strategies for change very rigid which cannot be changed often and acknowledge what you deliver to your audience.

Sources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
James, Rachel. “Promoting Sustainable Behavior- a guide to successful communication”. Web. August 2010.
Xu, Yongwen. ” literature review on web application Gamification and analytics”. Web. August 2011.
http://www.yukaichou.com
Albornoz, Denisse. 'Methods for Social Change'. Web. February 2014. The link for the same is here- http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change.

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About Dipali Sheth:

Studying in my 3rd year at Christ University gave me the opportunity to intern at Centre for Internet and Society. This post has been a result of my internship for a month under the Making Change program at CIS. My interest in Research and New Media started the journey here and has only added to making Research my zeal in the near future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/reaping-the-benefits-of-gamification

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:12:24Z

This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world.

In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.

The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies.

Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.

Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis.

Other Digital Natives

Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.

For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities.

Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young

Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.

It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of.

Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives.

Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital

It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.

Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions.

Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives

This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.

But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.

Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality

This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native.

The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us.

I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based.

Banner image credit: AFSC Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/

This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives

Inputs to the public consultation on the draft Code on Social Security (Central) Rules, 2020 - Joint submission by an alliance of trade unions and civil society organisations

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2020-12-22T09:52:13Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) contributed to a joint submission by IT for Change and various trade union and civil society organisations in response to the public consultation of the Ministry of Labour and Employment on the draft Code on Social Security Rules, 2020. Here are the overview, full text of the submitted inputs, and names of organisations and individuals who endorsed them.

Cross-posted from IT for Change.

Full text of submitted inputs: Download (PDF)

Overview

A legal framework that addresses workers’ rights in the digital economy from all angles is imperative to address labour concerns in the 21st century. We welcome the inclusion of platform workers and gig workers in the Code on Social Security, 2020. However, we have some concerns regarding the draft Code on Social Security (Central) Rules, 2020 (hereinafter the “Draft Rules”), vis-à-vis the implementation of platform workers’ rights. In this document, we first list down our overall concerns before proceeding to a section specific critique in the format required by the consultation.

1. Failure to universalise social security for platform workers: In their current form, the Draft Rules do not provide a social security framework for platform workers founded on the cardinal principles of universal social security. A basic social protection floor for all platform workers, including benefits such as universal maternal care and accident insurance, has not been guaranteed. Instead, the Draft Rules impose an age limit for platform workers to be eligible for social security [Rule 50(2)(d)], and also confer on the government the power to prescribe additional eligibility criteria [Rule 50(2)(f)]. These provisions are likely to narrow the pool of workers who can avail the benefits under this law. Also, facilitation centres and toll-free helplines to onboard platform and gig workers into any future social security schemes have not been provided for in the Draft Rules, even though these were mentioned in the Code on Social Security, 2020.

2. Lack of clarity on aggregator contributions: The Draft Rules also indicate that aggregators will have to contribute towards any social security scheme that may be framed by the government. This is appreciated. However, further clarity on how these contributions will be assessed in the context of the reality of platform work arrangements is needed. Platform workers may work for several aggregators simultaneously, and be engaged as workers for intermittent and irregular periods of time. As it stands, the Draft Rules do not address how the minimum period of 90 days of being engaged as a platform worker is to be calculated — a mandatory eligibility criteria for registration under Rule 50(2)(d). It also does not outline how the number of days worked impacts the nature and extent of social protection that platform workers are eligible for. Additionally, under Guideline 6 of the Motor Vehicles Aggregators Guidelines, 2020 issued in November 2020, certain compliances are imposed on aggregators towards their drivers, such as health insurance and term insurance. It is unclear how obligations under the Motor Vehicles Aggregators Guidelines, 2020 will apply in consonance with aggregators’ contributions under the Draft Rules on the Code on Social Security, 2020.

3. Absence of clear criteria to determine exemption of aggregators from contributions to social security: Section 114(7)(ii) of the Code on Social Security, 2020 permits the central government to use its discretionary powers to exempt aggregators from contributions to platform workers’ social security. It would have been important for the Draft Rules to clearly spell out the conditions under which aggregators could be exempted to ensure that aggregators do not evade their responsibilities towards their platform workers and gig workers. This has not been done, and aggregator exemption is now possible solely at the discretion of the central government.

4. Flaws in the mechanisms outlined for constituting the National Social Security Board for Gig Workers and Platform Workers: There is currently no timeline for its constitution, leaving its existence to be determined as per the whims of the government. Furthermore, there is no transparency in the Draft Rules around the procedure by which the central government will nominate platform workers’ representatives to this Board. In this regard, the lack of a clearly spelt out role for trade unions and workers’ associations is also a major flaw, as workers’ organisations must have effective representation concerning social security schemes intended for their benefit.

5. No guarantees for workers’ data rights: We are also concerned that the Draft Rules attempt to create a centralised database of platform workers and gig workers, to be enabled by the sharing of data by aggregators with the state. This data will include workers’ personal data, and in the absence of personal data protection legislation, this has serious implications for workers’ data rights and privacy. It is imperative that the draft Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 be passed at the earliest to safeguard against state and/or aggregator excesses in this regard. We also recommend the inclusion of clear purpose and use limitation safeguards in these Draft Rules itself, as part of enshrining the right to privacy. Additionally, workers must have the right to edit, correct and dispute the records of aggregators, and a mechanism for such an audit must be established by the government. Workers must also have the right to retain a certified, machine-readable copy of their data.

6. Shortcomings of a centralised database: We also urge the central government to rethink the vision of a centralised database, and instead, explore the possibility of a federated architecture, with room for democratic and decentralised data management by workers themselves with involvement from state and local government agencies (building on labour welfare models). We are firmly of the view that the concentration of power and authority in the Central Government is unlikely to enable access to every last worker in a country of our complexity and size.

7. Inadequacies of the foundational legislation: We would also like to highlight how the foundational flaws of the Code on Social Security, 2020 mar the efficacy and effectiveness of the Draft Rules in being able to provide social security entitlements to platform and gig workers. Firstly, in Chapter 1, Section 2 of the Code, there is no clarification on what to do about platform aggregators repeatedly referring to their “platform workers” as “contractors” or “agents” in their legal contracts/documents. The definitions clause assumes that “agent”, “contractor” and “platform worker” are all separate and unique, unambiguous terms. It would have been important for the Draft Rules to clarify that if “agent” or “contractor” is being used to refer to a person performing platform work in any legal document or contract by an aggregator, the person should nonetheless be treated as a “platform worker”. Also, the Draft Rules should have specified that all workers associated with any of the nine classes of aggregators mentioned in the Seventh Schedule of the Code on Social Security, 2020 [ride sharing, food and grocery delivery, logistics, e-marketplace, professional services provider, healthcare, travel and hospitality, content and media services, and any other goods and services provider platforms] are to be treated as platform workers. Secondly, there should be clarity on the jurisdiction, i.e. under which ministry and legislative act, will “aggregators” function and operate, especially considering that a range of sectoral legislation in addition to labour laws are implicated in aggregator governance. Thirdly, the Code on Social Security, 2020 could have specified how the agency in charge of collection and management of aggregator contributions was to have been constituted. For example, it could have been conceived as a statutory and autonomous body, along the lines of the Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) and Employee Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO). But this opportunity has been missed.

The following trade unions, civil society organisations and members of academia have endorsed this submission and its proposals:

Trade unions

All India Gig Workers Union

All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union

All India Port & Dock Workers Federation

All India Railwaymens' Federation

Hind Mazdoor Sabha

Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers

National Federation of Indian Railwaymen

National Union of Seafarers of India

Civil society organisations

Aapti Institute

Gender at Work

GenDev Centre for Research and Innovation LLP

IT for Change

Kamgar va Majur Sangh

The Centre for Internet & Society

Tandem Research

TWN Trust

Paigam Network

Praxis - Institute for Participatory Practices

Partners in Change

Working People’s Charter, India

Members of academia

Divya K., Assistant Professor, Indira Gandhi National Tribal University

Dr. Rahul Sakpal, Assistant Professor, Tata Institute of Social Sciences

Vibhuti Patel, Retired Professor of Tata Institute of Social Sciences and SNDT Women's University, Mumbai

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/joint-submission-to-consultation-on-draft-code-on-social-security-central-rules-2020

Data Lives of Humanities Text

sneha-pp — 2020-12-23T13:07:43Z

The ‘computational turn’ in the humanities has brought with it several questions and challenges for traditional ways of engaging with the ‘text’ as an object of enquiry. The prevalence of data-driven scholarship in the humanities offers several challenges to traditional forms of work and practice, with regard to theory, tools, and methods. In the context of the digital, ‘text’ acquires new forms and meanings, especially with practices such as distant reading. Drawing upon excerpts from an earlier study on digital humanities in India, this essay discusses how data in the humanities is not a new phenomenon; concerns about the ‘datafication’ of humanities, now seen prominently in digital humanities and related fields is actually reflective of a longer conflict about the inherited separation between humanities and technology. It looks at how ‘data’ in the humanities has become a new object of enquiry as a result of several changes in the media landscape in the past few decades. These include large-scale digitalization and availability of corpora of materials (digitized and born-digital) in an array of formats and across varied platforms, thus leading to also a steady prevalence of the use of computational methods in working with and studying cultural artifacts today. This essay also explores how reading ‘text as data’ helps understand the role of data in the making of humanities texts and redefines traditional ideas of textuality, reading, and the reader.

This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha was published in Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (2020) edited by Sandeep Mertia, with a Foreword by Ravi Sundaram as part of the Series on Theory on Demand by Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.

Read the open access book here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/data-lives-of-humanities-text

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

sumandro — 2020-12-30T09:40:52Z

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

Text of submitted inputs: Read (PDF)

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

Inputs

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

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

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

Clause 3.8 (iv): Introducing collective privacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Clause 4.9: Data trustees

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

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

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

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

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

Clause 4.10 (iii): Data trusts

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

Clause 4.10 (iv): Mandatory sharing and competition

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

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

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

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

Chapter 7, Recommendation 5: Purpose of data-sharing

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

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

Clause 7.1 (i): Data needs of law enforcement

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

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

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

Clause 7.2 (iii): Power of government bodies

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

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

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

Clause 8.2 (x): Composition of the Authority

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

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

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

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

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

Endnotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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