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WhatsApp races against time to fix fake news mess ahead of 2019 general elections
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-venkat-ananth-july-24-2018-whatsapp-races-against-time-to-fix-fake-news-mess-ahead-of-2019-general-elections
<b>On Friday, when WhatsApp announced that it would pilot a ‘five media-based forwards limit’ in India, the government came up with an unequivocal reminder.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Venkat Ananth was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/whatsapp-races-against-time-to-fix-fake-news-mess-ahead-of-2019-general-elections/articleshow/65112280.cms">Economic Times</a> on July 24, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">“When rumours and fake news get propagated by mischief mongers, the medium used for such propagation cannot evade responsibility and accountability. If they remain mute spectators, they are liable to be treated as abettors and thereafter face consequent legal action,” noted a ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) statement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The statement also said there was a need for bringing in traceability and accountability, “when a provocative/inflammatory message is detected and a request is made by law enforcement agencies.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Significantly, MeitY took aim at WhatsApp’s core end-to-end encryptionbased product feature and its oft-quoted and reiterated commitment to privacy. It was specific, going beyond the usual “do more” requests.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The stand also poses an interesting dilemma for the messenger service. How can it act while protecting its privacy commitment?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“It is practical ly impossible for WhatsApp to regulate content in the peer-to-peer encrypted environment it is set up in,” says Rahul Matthan, partner, Trilegal. “An encrypted platform is what we want. The government is trying to maintain a strict and difficult balance. The government tends to err on the side of violating civil liberties over offering privacy to innocent users. The WhatsApp case is going in that direction.”</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">No Longer Low-Key</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In India, its largest market, WhatsApp has benefitted from quietly operating in the shadows of its more popular parent, Facebook, growing to a currently active user base of 200 million.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, in the last six months, while it continues to be perceived as an asset by politicos for outreach and propaganda, WhatsApp is now increasingly being tapped by the bad guys to disseminate deliberate misinformation, rumour mongering and fake news. And not the Donald Trump kind either.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is leading to loss of lives on the ground, through lynchings, kidnappings and related crimes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp spokesperson Carl Woog says, “The recent acts of violence in India have been heartbreaking and reinforce the need for government, civil society and technology companies to work together to keep people safe.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“By focusing on solutions to fake news inside our smartphones, we are ignoring a tougher problem that requires several complementary solutions,” says Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based lawyer and cofounder of the Internet Freedom Foundation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Let us not forget that a platform is not responsible for policing.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But the general public and government perception — and, to some extent, concern — remains that WhatsApp has been slow to react to these situations.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">To Police or Not to Police</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Interestingly, the government and ruling party realise WhatsApp could be pivotal to their fortunes in the next electoral cycle — in the run-up to Elections<br />2019.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The government is coming under increased pressure to act on these lynchings, which is why it is taking a shootthe-messenger kind of an approach,” says Matthan. “An unsophisticated government would have advocated a blanket ban on the source. But here, the government, it appears, wants to regulate tech by having access to your device, through an app, in the case of the (telecom regulator) Trai DND app to battle spam.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is also why WhatsApp has intensified its outreach efforts. Over the past 10 days, a team of its US and India-based executives have been meeting key stakeholders in Delhi and Mumbai, including the Election Commission, political parties, the Reserve Bank of India, banks and civil society, as ET reported last week.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The team includes public policy manager Ben Supple, senior director, customer operations, Komal Lahiri and WhatsApp India communication manager Pragya Misra Mehrishi. They are now expected to meet key government officials from MeitY from Monday, sources say.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The intense outreach efforts is essentially linked to WhatsApp wanting to protect its payments play in India,” says a Delhi-based public policy professional, who did not want to be named as he is not authorised to speak to the media.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“It (WhatsApp) is really worried about Google’s efforts with Tez and the gap that will only widen if the government delays grant of permission.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp is stressing some key points while reinforcing the steps it is taking to counter challenges. One, the best practices of using the platform. Two, the need to work together to prevent abuse of WhatsApp, and three, most importantly, to educate people about the best ways of using the platform. WhatsApp was primarily designed for private, oneon-one messaging or group chats among acquaintances, not for mass broadcast, which parties resort to during elections.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp says it is working on a warfooting to tackle the problems. It has introduced product changes to counter user behaviour. There’s more control, where a group ‘admin’ can restrict users who can send messages to the group, modify a group icon or edit description, a feature for which it has taken a leaf out of rival Telegram’s book. To counter fake news, it added a ‘forwarded’ label. And now, limited the forwarding to five in India, and 20 in the rest of the markets, a significant reduction from 250 prior to that.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the impact of these product tweaks is yet to be seen at an individual user level, the larger concern for WhatsApp today is the potential misuse of its platform to manipulate elections, a very real possibility next year.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Tipping Point</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The company’s noticeable change of tack comes after it noticed certain trends during the recent Karnataka elections, during which one of its executives spent a week in Bengaluru.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One of the political parties, which a person aware of the developments in WhatsApp declined to name, was using “dozens of accounts to create thousands of groups,” as part of its campaign.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The party, the source says, was adding random numbers (approximately 100) to the group during creation. By random numbers, he meant people who did not know each other, something WhatsApp can identify using the metadata it collects when a user gives it access to its phone book. WhatsApp deems this behaviour ‘organised spamming.’</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“These were real people not necessarily known to each other,” says the person quoted above. “A specific account would be added to that group to be made the admin.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mostly, this admin was the number used to create these multiple groups or, in WhatsApp terms, the account that was not behaving the way private or group communication happens.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Also, the users would be a mix of fake accounts, which is a major red flag for WhatsApp. “The group starts with some bulk added users and then the real ones get bulk-added,” says the source. WhatsApp deems this practice a violation of its terms of service.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Company sources add that WhatsApp was able to detect these trends and proactively banned these users before they were able to add people. “In some cases, our systems didn’t catch this in time, but we were able to proactively prevent users from receiving such spam. That detection is now internalised and if someone tries to replicate that behaviour anywhere in the world, we will be able to detect them,” says another person familiar with developments at WhatsApp.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to several media reports, the BJP and the Congress too created over 30,000 groups for campaigning and organising efforts. To counter organised political spamming, WhatsApp has now begun using machine learning tools. WhatsApp can trace the last few messages in a group and block it entirely from the platform. At the detection level, WhatsApp checks for familiarity. “Do the persons know each other, or have they interacted before?” through metadata it possesses through phone numbers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The second person quoted in the story says the company now focuses its detection “upstream,” that is, catching the user at the registration stage. “When you register on WhatsApp and immediately create a group, questions asked are, ‘Does this behaviour look like what a regular user does? Or does it look like users who have misused it in the past?’” he says.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp, sources tell ET, is also using machine learning to detect sequential numbers that could be used to create these groups. “If they go and buy a phone number, they go to one carrier and its mostly sequential. If we notice 100 numbers with the same prefix have signed up, nearly 80 get automatically banned. What we do is feed these sequences, permutations and combinations to detect good/bad users,” the person quoted above says. “It learns millions of these combination signals on behaviour and help us make a decision.”</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Civil Society as a Key Layer</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp also sees an enabling role for civil society, especially for digital literacy. Its team has currently met seven non-governmental organisations, including digital literacy groups and others involved in the area of financial inclusion. This is part of its public policy efforts while also solidifying its payments play.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“The level of responsibility for a platform is to not consciously cause — and, in fact, to take active measures to prevent — social harm,” says Gupta of IFF. “It has to be done without injury to end-to-end encryption, which offers safety and privacy to users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many products and product strategies can be adopted — from increasing media diversity on the platform to promoting auditing features that rely on partnerships with fact-checking organisations. We must demand accountability but resist the rhetorical attraction of technophobia.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As ET has reported, WhatsApp will adapt a fact-checking model, Verificado 2018, deployed during the recent Mexican presidential elections. Verificado proactively debunked fake news and misinformation on the platform. “The rumours were found to be very similar to India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Verificado was specifically focused on misinformation from candidates,” says the first person quoted in the story. “Plus, it helped effectively tackle misinformation during an earthquake in Mexico.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For WhatsApp, one of the key learnings from the Mexico elections was that it could look at the spam reports and categorise them as politics-related. The company, unsurprisingly, saw an increase in political spam in the buildup to election day.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“They realised Verificado assists users to get help within the app. But it also aids news organisations, political parties, the government and users,” adds the person. The company is undertaking a similar exercise in Brazil, where 24 media outlets have come together under the Comprova initiative to fact-check viral content and rumours on WhatsApp.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bengaluru-based Centre for Internet and Society believes WhatsApp can further tweak its product to enable real-time checks. “They can enable a ‘fact check this’ button for users to upload content to a fact-checking database. If the content has already been fact-checked, the score can be displayed immediately. Alternatively, the fact-checking service can return the score at a later date,” he explains.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-venkat-ananth-july-24-2018-whatsapp-races-against-time-to-fix-fake-news-mess-ahead-of-2019-general-elections'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-venkat-ananth-july-24-2018-whatsapp-races-against-time-to-fix-fake-news-mess-ahead-of-2019-general-elections</a>
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No publisherAdminSocial MediaWhatsAppInternet GovernancePrivacy2018-07-25T15:27:20ZNews Item'Full belief in fake texts shows cops not trusted'
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-18-2018-full-belief-in-fake-texts-shows-cops-not-trusted
<b>Nilotpal Basu and Abhijeet Nath, an audio engineer and digital artiste, were beaten to death in Assam's Karbi Anglong last week based on rumours that they were kidnappers.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/full-belief-in-fake-texts-shows-cops-not-trusted/articleshow/64627080.cms">Times of India</a> on June 18, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted. Inputs from Kim Arora.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">A manipulated <a class="key_underline" href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/whatsapp">WhatsApp</a> video is said to be the source of the panic. While it is just the medium and not the reason behind the killings, WhatsApp, with its 250-million users in India, allows rumours to travel farther than ever before. "In many non-urban areas, such WhatsApp videos are the first form in which people encounter the internet on their phones. They don't always go online and verify them," says Jency Jacob, who runs the fact checking outlet Boom. This gullibility can't be explained just by class or education, he says. "Technology makes it easy to believe what you want to believe and spread it," says Jacob.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The spread of internet gives wings to rumours in pockets where kidnappings are a real fear. The states where lynchings have been reported are also among those with high figures for child abductions. Technology has helped rumours travel greater distances with greater impunity, says Pranesh Prakash, fellow at Centre for Internet and Society, recalling that child abduction rumours led to a lynching in Tamil Nadu in 2015 too, but this time, "such rumours have spread all over South India". And as the Karbi Anglong killings show, to Assam as well.<br /><br />WhatsApp being an encrypted platform, police cannot trace the source of the rumourmongering. WhatsApp did not respond to TOI's queries on tracing origins of hate messages, but a spokesperson shared a statement saying they "block automated messages" and are educating people about spotting fake news and hoaxes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In many cases, law enforcement has failed at a more basic level. Child abduction is a disturbing rumour, designed to provoke an emotional reaction, but other anxieties are at work too. "Rumours tend to escalate when there is a lack of official information, and clearly many feel what happens to them and their children does not get attention at higher levels," says sociologist Dipankar Gupta. It also points to a collapse in the state's credibility, he says. So, Gupta says, "there is no seeking of justice, only reprisal."</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-18-2018-full-belief-in-fake-texts-shows-cops-not-trusted'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-18-2018-full-belief-in-fake-texts-shows-cops-not-trusted</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaWhatsAppInternet Governance2018-06-26T01:21:04ZNews ItemWhy NPCI and Facebook need urgent regulatory attention
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-june-10-2018-sunil-abraham-why-npci-and-facebook-need-urgent-regulatory-attention
<b>The world’s oldest networked infrastructure, money, is increasingly dematerialising and fusing with the world’s latest networked infrastructure, the Internet. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/banking/finance/banking/why-npci-and-facebook-need-urgent-regulatory-attention/articleshow/64522587.cms">Economic Times</a> on June 10, 2018.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the network effects compound, disruptive acceleration hurtle us towards financial utopia, or dystopia. Our fate depends on what we get right and what we get wrong with the law, code and architecture, and the market.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Internet, unfortunately, has completely transformed from how it was first architected. From a federated, generative network based on free software and open standards, into a centralised, environment with an increasing dependency on proprietary technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In countries like Myanmar, some citizens misconstrue a single social media website, Facebook, for the internet, according to LirneAsia research. India is another market where Facebook could still get its brand mistaken for access itself by some users coming online. This is Facebook put so many resources into the battle over Basics, in the run-up to India’s network neutrality regulation. an odd corporation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On hand, its business model is what some term surveillance capitalism. On the other hand, by acquiring WhatsApp and by keeping end-toend (E2E) encryption “on”, it has ensured that one and a half billion users can concretely exercise their right to privacy. At the time of the acquisition, WhatsApp founders believed Facebook’s promise that it would never compromise on their high standards of privacy and security. But 18 months later, Facebook started harvesting data and diluting E2E.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In April this year, my colleague Ayush Rathi and I wrote in Asia Times that WhatsApp no longer deletes multimedia on download but continues to store it on its servers. Theoretically, using the very same mechanism, Facebook could also be retaining encrypted text messages and comprehensive metadata from WhatsApp users indefinitely without making this obvious.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">My friend, Srikanth Lakshmanan, founder of the CashlessConsumer collective, is a keen observer of this space. He says in India, “we are seeing an increasing push towards a bank-led model, thanks to National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and its control over Unified Payments Interface (UPI), which is also known as the cashless layer of the India Stack.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">NPCI is best understood as a shape shifter. Arundhati Ramanathan puts it best when she says “depending on the time and context, NPCI is a competitor. It is a platform. It is a regulator. It is an industry association. It is a profitable non-profit. It is a rule maker. It is a judge. It is a bystander.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This results in UPI becoming, what Lakshmanan calls, a NPCI-club-good rather than a new generation digital public good. He also points out that NPCI has an additional challenge of opacity — “it doesn’t provide any metrics on transaction failures, and being a private body, is not subject to proactive or reactive disclosure requirements under the RTI.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Technically, he says, UPI increases fragility in our financial ecosystem since it “is a centralised data maximisation network where NPCI will always have the superset of data.” Given that NPCI has opted for a bank-led model in India, it is very unlikely that Facebook able to leverage its monopoly the social media market duopoly it shares with in the digital advertising market to become a digital payments monopoly.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, NCPI and Facebook both share the following traits — one, an insatiable appetite for personal information; two, a fetish for hypercentralisation; three, a marginal commitment to transparency, and four, poor track record as a custodian of consumer trust. The marriage between these like-minded entities has already had a dubious beginning.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Previously, every financial technology wanting direct access to the NPCI infrastructure had to have a tie-up with a bank. But for Facebook and Google, as they are large players, it was decided to introduce a multi-bank model. This was definitely the right thing to do from a competition perspective. But, unfortunately, the marriage between the banks and the internet giant was arranged by NPCI in an opaque process and WhatsApp was exempted from the full NPCI certification process for its beta launch.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Both NPCI and Facebook need urgent regulatory attention. A modern data protection law and a more proactive competition regulator is required for Facebook. The NPCI will hopefully also be subjected to the upcoming data protection law. But it also requires a range of design, policy and governance fixes to ensure greater privacy and security via data minimisation and decentralisation; greater accountability and transparency to the public; separation of powers for better governance and open access policies to prevent anti-competitive behaviour.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-june-10-2018-sunil-abraham-why-npci-and-facebook-need-urgent-regulatory-attention'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/economic-times-june-10-2018-sunil-abraham-why-npci-and-facebook-need-urgent-regulatory-attention</a>
</p>
No publishersunilSocial MediaInternet GovernancePrivacy2018-06-12T02:07:42ZBlog EntryAllow admins to add users to online group chats only after permission: SFLC.in
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-1-2018-allow-admins-to-add-users-to-online-group-chats-only-after-permission-sflc-in
<b>SFLC.in -- a donor supported legal services organisation -- has written an open letter to messaging service providers like WhatsApp, Facebook and others, urging them to modify their platforms to ensure that users are not added to group chats without their permission.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/allow-admins-to-add-users-to-online-group-chats-only-after-permission-sflc-in/articleshow/64416022.cms">Times of India</a> on June 1, 2018.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In its letter, Software Freedom Law Centre, India (SFLC.in) said any user with administrator rights can currently add another person to the group without the latter's permission.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the absence of a mechanism to prevent themselves from being added to groups that they would not like to participate in, users have no option but to manually exit the groups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This is a troubling state of affairs because users may be forcefully exposed to a range of subjectively undesirable content that they would never have signed up for otherwise, which can be particularly damaging, especially in situations where malicious actors attempt to intimidate, disparage, harass or harm individuals in any way," the letter said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The letter has also been co-signed by Digital Empowerment Foundation, Centre for Internet and Society and a few others.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Emails sent to Facebook, Tencent and others seeking their comments did not elicit any response.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">SFLC.in argued that the current format is an issue for many, including those belonging to minority and vulnerable groups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"While blocking malicious actors can usually help mitigate the damage to an extent, on online messaging services like yours, they are able to easily circumvent blocks by creating groups and adding their targets to these groups," it said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The problem is only made worse when personal information like phone numbers, user IDs and photographs are shared with a large number of users, which could open the doors to even greater abuse, it added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">SFLC.in argued that there are no adequate safeguards to prevent infringement of user rights and therefore, these platforms should take immediate steps to address this issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"...implement measures to make it so that being added to group conversations without permission is no longer a possibility. Not only will this greatly help in limiting abusive uses of your services, but it will also make users less wary of using the services, making the Internet a safer space for us all," it added.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-1-2018-allow-admins-to-add-users-to-online-group-chats-only-after-permission-sflc-in'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-june-1-2018-allow-admins-to-add-users-to-online-group-chats-only-after-permission-sflc-in</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaInternet Governance2018-06-26T02:03:19ZNews ItemElection Experiment Proves Facebook Just Doesn't Care About Fake News In India
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-visvak-may-30-2018-election-experiment-proves-facebook-just-doesnt-care-about-fake-news-in-india
<b>Much-hyped fact-checking initiative identified only 30 bits of fake news in month-long Karnataka campaign. Yup — 30!</b>
<p>The article by Visvak was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/05/30/election-experiment-proves-facebook-just-doesnt-care-about-fake-news-in-india_a_23446483/">Huffington Post</a> on May 30, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">On April 16, a little less than a month before Karnataka went to the polls, Facebook <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/h/announcing-third-party-fact-checking-in-india/">announced</a> a partnership with Boom Live, an Indian fact-checking website, to fight fake news during the Karnataka assembly polls.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Five days before the partnership was announced, an embattled Mark Zuckerberg stood before the the US Congress. Under fire for having allowed his platform to be used to manipulate elections, he <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2018/04/09/transcript-mark-zuckerberg-testimony-to-congress-on-cambridge-analytica-509978">declared</a> that his company would do everything it could to protect the integrity of elections in India and elsewhere.</p>
<p>Facebook's press-release promised as much:</p>
<p class="callout" style="text-align: justify; ">We have learned that once a story is rated as false, we have been able to reduce its distribution by 80%, and thereby improve accuracy of information on Facebook and reduce misinformation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Yet, the pilot project in Karnataka suggests Facebook has a long way to go to keep Zuckerberg's promise. In an election cycle <a href="https://www.thequint.com/news/webqoof/fake-news-karnataka-assembly-election-2018-jihadi-murder">widely</a> <a href="https://www.deccanherald.com/state/fake-news-rains-karnataka-goes-polls-669470.html">acknowledged</a> as rife with misinformation, fake polls and surveys, communally coloured rumours, and blatant lies peddled by campaigners, rating stories as "false" proved to be so difficult and time consuming that the Facebook partnership was only able to debunk 30 pieces of misinformation — 25 in the run-up to the polls, and 5 in the immediate aftermath — in the month long campaign.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The much-ballyhooed partnership added up to a small financial contribution from Facebook that allowed Boom to hire two fact-checkers, one in its offices in Mumbai and one based on the ground in Bengaluru, specifically to track the election. The fact-checkers were also given access to a Facebook dashboard that could be used to discover and counter misinformation on the platform.</p>
<p>Boom did not reveal the sum involved or allow HuffPost India access to the dashboard, citing a non-disclosure agreement. Facebook's representatives declined comment on a detailed questionnaire sent to them.</p>
<h2>A Gushing Sewer of Fake News</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Globally, Facebook's fact-checking initiative is a little over a year old, but the partnership with Boom marks its advent in India, the company's largest market.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It's a late start, a very late start." says Pratik Sinha, co-founder of AltNews, another prominent fact-checking website. "But they're doing something now, which is good."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Yet Govindraj Ethiraj, Founder-Editor of Boom Live, said the social networking giant's contribution to their fact-checking efforts was of limited utility. "Facebook's involvement didn't really help us," he said. "This was more about us helping them."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ethiraj identified Facebook-owned WhatsApp as the primary medium for the propagation of fake news during the Karnataka election. Each of the three major parties in the fray <a href="https://www.thenewsminute.com/article/fighting-fake-news-inside-karnatakas-virtual-campaign-trail-81042">reportedly</a> set up tens of thousands of groups on the platform in an effort to spread their message. Facebook is yet to figure out a way to allow fact-checkers into the platform without breaking the end-to-end encryption which makes it impossible for messages to be tracked.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But even on Facebook, which lends itself far more easily to tracking and monitoring, the tools that the company has built to track fake news are not particularly effective.</p>
<blockquote class="quoted" style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook allows advertisers to micro-target content at users using specific attributes, and users are unlikely to report content that agrees with their ideological biases.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In his office in the aging Sun Mill Compound in Mumbai's Lower Parel, Jency Jacob, Managing Editor of Boom logged into the dashboard and scrolled through the gushing sewer of user-flagged content pouring in from around the world: stories about dinosaur remains and ancient caves, tales of celebrities battling mysterious diseases, and ordinary people undergoing plastic surgeries to look like celebrities, mixed in with news – both real and fake – that users found objectionable. There's one about the rise in fuel prices and there's even a <a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.in/2018/05/21/video-dalit-man-tied-flogged-beaten-to-death-in-gujarat-say-media-reports_a_23439751/">Huffpost India story</a>, about a Dalit being flogged to death in Gujarat. (The HuffPost India story, the editorial board can affirm, is true.)</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"I can't claim that it doesn't affect me," admitted Jacob. "This morning, the first thing I saw after waking up was a video of a woman kicking a 3-year-old baby and slamming her on the ground. We are in the rush of it right now, but I don't think we will enjoy doing this all our lives."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"A lot of it is dependent on how users are reporting," Jacob continued, explaining that the dashboard tool relies on users to flag potentially "fake" news. "If the users aren't reporting it, it isn't going to come into the queue."</p>
<p>This is a blind spot as Facebook <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/14/technology/facebook-ads-congress.html">allows advertisers to micro-target</a> content at users using specific attributes, and users are unlikely to report content that agrees with their ideological biases.</p>
<h2>Everything But English</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook's dashboard cannot be used to report non-English content. In India, local language users outnumber English language users and more are coming online every day. The dashboard is also unable to filter stories relevant to a specific location, despite Facebook allowing advertisers to geo-target their advertisements with reasonable accuracy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jacob reckons the tool will get better at dealing with the Indian context over time. "This was always intended to be a pilot project. It will take them time to figure out how to get us more relevant leads," he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">With not much help forthcoming from Facebook, Boom relied on its own tried and tested methods of tracking misinformation. Its fact-checkers monitored pages and websites known to be potential sources of fake news, told friends and family to forward anything suspicious they came across, and maintained their own reporting channel - a dedicated WhatsApp helpline for users to direct suspicious looking links.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These methods threw up about 4-5 actionable leads every day. To fact-check them, Boom deployed a combination of old school journalistic practices, such as getting fact-checkers to call sources, and tech tools like video and image matching software.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Fact-checking is a painstaking process that involves a great deal of manual effort.</p>
<p class="callout" style="text-align: justify; ">"The way we measure virality is a bit of a crude method. We check whether several of us have received it or not, and whether it is being shared on all three platforms."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Essentially, we are saying what we are saying is true, don't believe others," said Sinha. "That's a very arrogant position to take. To say that in a world full of information, there has to be a process where we take the audience from the claim to the truth. Gathering the information required to do that takes a lot of time."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to Jacob, it sometimes takes 2-3 people working all day to fact-check a single video. And Boom only has 6 fact-checkers in all, including the two Facebook-funded hires. Given these constraints, they could act on only a fraction of the tip-offs.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"We were not looking at volume, but at impact," said Jacob, indicating that they focused their attention on misinformation that was going viral. "The way we measure virality is a bit of a crude method. We check whether several of us have received it or not, and whether it is being shared on all three platforms."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jacob admits that there were many more stories that they could have tackled, but he says that it was impossible to address them all with the limited resources available to them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sinha reckons that Facebook already has the technology to significantly alleviate the manpower issue. "If you upload a video to Facebook and there's a copyright violation, they pull the video. So they know how to match videos. If they leverage that technology and apply it to fake news, it'll reduce the mundane work we have to do by half," he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While Facebook's contribution to Boom's sourcing and fact-checking processes was minimal, it does seem to have had a significant impact on how fact-checks were disseminated. The Facebook dashboard allows fact-checkers to <a href="https://www.facebook.com/facebookmedia/get-started/fact-checking">tag content with ratings</a> ranging from 'true' to 'false' with a few options in between and also attach their fact-check articles to the content. The platform then attempts to reduce distribution of the content and display the fact-check article to users whenever they encounter it on the news feed or attempt to share it.</p>
<h2 style="text-align: justify; ">Major Victory</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This system claimed its first major victory within a week of the partnership being announced when several major media outlets including NDTV India, India Today and Republic published a list of purported star campaigners for the Congress party that turned out to be fabricated.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Boom rated the articles false and linked their <a href="https://www.boomlive.in/news-websites-report-fake-list-of-congress-star-campaigners-for-karnataka-polls/">fact-check</a>. Jacob could not verify if this reduced the articles' distribution by the 80% figure <a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/hard-questions-false-news/">touted</a> by Facebook, but said there was a clear impact.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"NDTV India carried the story and we noticed that their traffic dropped after we linked our fact-check to their article," said Jacob. With traffic plummeting and users being shown fake news warnings when interacting with their content, most of the media houses that published the list either issued clarifications or took their articles down.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">After the initial success, Boom quickly ran into the limitations of the ratings system. Fact-checks could only be done on links and not on image, video, or text posts. Facebook eventually granted Boom access to image and video posts, but text posts are still beyond the purview of fact-checkers.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While that change was likely a simple fix that only required a switch to be flipped, there are other restrictions on the ratings system that are unlikely to be lifted as easily.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From the beginning of the election cycle, false statements by prominent politicians - including the Prime Minister - were an everyday affair. As is the norm, they were faithfully reported by most media outlets without critique or context. Misinformation masquerading as opinion, wherein a set of legimitate facts are presented out of context to arrive at a blatantly false conclusion, was also a persistent feature during the polls. Such articles add to the whirlwind of campaign misinformation, but are exempted from the rating system.</p>
<p class="callout" style="text-align: justify; ">"Facebook needs to figure out a more aggressive model of showing the explanatory article to the reader."</p>
<p>Sinha believes that misinformation that falls into these grey areas cannot be laid at Facebook's door.</p>
<p>But Pranesh Prakash, Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, said such restrictions were "extraordinarily stupid."</p>
<p>"As long as the distinction is made that the publication isn't msiquoting and the politician is saying something that is false - and that's easy enough to do - I can't think of a possible justification," he said, regarding false statements made by public figures.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As for misleading opinion pieces Prakash said, "Most falsehoods are not just statements that present incorrect facts, but that present facts in an incorrect context. It's clearly the context that speaks to how people interpret facts. Fact checkers can't be people who only look at facts as black and white things."</p>
<p>Facebook's suggested method of dealing with such articles is to attach fact-check articles to them while assigning them a 'not eligible' rating. Jacob reckons that this is yet another blind spot.</p>
<p>"Facebook needs to figure out a more aggressive model of showing the explanatory article to the reader. The way it is designed now, with the article showing up below as a related link, not many people will bother to go and click on that."</p>
<h2>The Whatsapp Problem</h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For all its flaws, the fact-checking initiative appears to be making an attempt at solving the problem of misinformation on Facebook's news feed. But the company hasn't even begun to address the 800-pound gorilla that is WhatsApp.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While Facebook has been castigated for playing fast and loose with privacy on its primary platform, the inherently better privacy features of the fully-encrypted Whatsapp platform have made it lethal when it comes to fake news. The lack of third party access, which has prevented Facebook from monetising WhatsApp chats - thus far - and security agencies from spying on them, has also made Whatsapp messages impossible to fact-check.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In Karnataka, WhatsApp was the primary vector for the spread of a series of fake polls, some of which were eventually picked up and published by mainstream media outlets. Unlike fake news that emerges on the Facebook and Twitter, it is impossible to trace the source of misinformation on Whatsapp.</p>
<blockquote class="quoted" style="text-align: justify; ">"Just as spam can be flagged and people can be barred if they're flagged as spammers, similarly, if people have been flagged as serial promoters of fake news, you can use that to nudge people's behaviour."</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"If Whatsapp had a trending list, our jobs would've been a lot easier," lamented Jacob. "By and large, we have figured out what goes viral on Facebook and Twitter. It might take a day to reach us, but eventually we catch anything that's going viral on these platforms. But Whatsapp is a black box."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash asserts that while encryption is a barrier, it does not make it impossible to police fake news on WhatApp. "Just as spam can be flagged and people can be barred if they're flagged as spammers, similarly, if people have been flagged as serial promoters of fake news, you can use that to nudge people's behaviour."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are indications that WhatsApp is attempting to develop features to tackle fake news. The platform has beta-tested features that would clearly <a href="https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-beta-for-android-2-18-67-whats-new/">identify</a>forwarded messages and <a href="https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-is-studying-some-methods-to-prevent-spam/">warn</a> users if a message has been forwarded more than 25 times. Jacob said that Facebook was working on a product that would throw up fact-check articles when a user interacts with a fake news URL on WhatsApp. If or when any of these features actually make it to users is a matter of conjecture.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prakash said the slow pace of progress on WhatsApp is just a reflection of the company's priorities. "It speaks to how American a company a Facebook is. Whatsapp is the real network for fake news in India, but it gets the least amount of attention."</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-visvak-may-30-2018-election-experiment-proves-facebook-just-doesnt-care-about-fake-news-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-visvak-may-30-2018-election-experiment-proves-facebook-just-doesnt-care-about-fake-news-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaFacebookInternet Governance2018-05-31T22:56:48ZNews ItemNow, Twitter too caught up in Cambridge Analytica controversy
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-april-30-2018-prasun-sonwalkar-vidhi-choudhury-now-twitter-too-caught-up-in-cambridge-analytica-controversy
<b>Twitter does not share a break-up of users by region, the platform has less than 100 million users in India.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Prasun Sonwalkar and Vidhi Choudhury was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/now-twitter-too-caught-up-in-cambridge-analytica-controversy/story-3SMBniRitMG7Ne85AX86wL.html">Hindustan Times</a> on April 30, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Social media company Twitter Inc sold data to the University of Cambridge academic Aleksandr Kogan who harvested millions of Facebook users’ information without their knowledge, it has emerged, although the company has clarified that no private data was accessed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It isn’t clear whether any of the data pertained to Indian users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter does not share a break-up of users by region, the platform has less than 100 million users in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Kogan, who created tools that allowed political consultancy Cambridge Analytica to psychologically profile and target voters, bought the data from the microblogging website in 2015, well before the recent scandal, involving use of the data of Facebook users, came to light.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to The Daily Telegraph, Kogan bought data on tweets, user names, photos, profiles and locations over a five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015 through his company Global Science Research (GSR). Twitter said it had banned GSR and Cambridge Analytica from buying data or running advertisements on the website and that no private data had been accessed, while Kogan insisted the data had only been used to create "brand reports" and "survey extender tools" and that he had not violated Twitter's policies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The daily reported that Twitter charges companies and organisations for large data sets that are particularly useful for gleaning public opinion or receptiveness to certain topics and ideas, although Twitter bans companies from using the data to derive sensitive political information or matching it with personal information obtained elsewhere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Twitter spokesman confirmed the ban and said: "Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. "Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The company said it does not allow "inferring or deriving sensitive information like race or political affiliation, or attempts to match a user's Twitter information with other personal identifiers" and that it had staff in place to police this "rigorously".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sunil Abraham, founder for think tank Centre for Internet and Society said: “Even though Twitter claims it has contracts in place and staff for contractual enforcement, I cannot understand how they will prevent those buying their data from inferring race and political affiliation. Especially in jurisdictions like ours without comprehensive data protection law.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A Cambridge Analytica spokesman said the company used Twitter for political advertising but insisted that it had never "undertaken a project with GSR focusing on Twitter data and Cambridge Analytica has never received Twitter data from GSR”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Delhi-based lawyer Apar Gupta said, “Since we do not have a data protection law at present we are more or less dependent on the proactive disclosures by Twitter. Facebook is not a gold standard of upholding user rights and it is hoped that we soon have a regulator that can enforce such disclosures and place penalties.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On 5 April, Facebook said user data of more than 560,000 Indians may have been harvested by British researcher Cambridge Analytica, at the centre of a recent storm over data breaches and potential privacy violations on the social media network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Twitter or Facebook are not alone in harvesting and storing user data. This is a widespread industry practice that relies on profiling. Such breaches and malpractices will continue to occur till we have a set of defined norms and enforceable penalties to protect user rights,” Gupta further added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Only 335 users in India installed the thisisyourdigitallife app developed by academic Kogan and his company Global Science Research that may have been possibly at the centre of the data breaches, according to Facebook. The 335 people make up just 0.1% of the app’s total worldwide installs. Users agreed to take a personality test and have their data collected by the app, which then went on to also access information about the test-takers’ Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a much larger data pool.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Twitter Inc’s spokesperson said in an e-mail that an internal review conducted by it showed GSR had not accessed any private data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Unlike many other services, Twitter is public by its nature. People come to Twitter to speak publicly, and public Tweets are viewable and searchable by anyone. In 2015, Global Science Research (GSR) did have one-time API access to a random sample of public Tweets from a five-month period from December 2014 to April 2015,” the company statement added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is basically information that users chose to make public.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-april-30-2018-prasun-sonwalkar-vidhi-choudhury-now-twitter-too-caught-up-in-cambridge-analytica-controversy'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-april-30-2018-prasun-sonwalkar-vidhi-choudhury-now-twitter-too-caught-up-in-cambridge-analytica-controversy</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaInternet GovernancePrivacy2018-05-02T02:49:25ZNews ItemWhat’s up with WhatsApp?
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp
<b>In 2016, WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption, but is the company doing what it claims to be doing?</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Aayush Rathi and Sunil Abraham was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://www.atimes.com/article/whats-up-with-whatsapp/">Asia Times</a> on April 20, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Back in April 2016, when WhatsApp Inc announced it was rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for its billion-plus strong user base as a default setting, the messaging behemoth signaled to its users it was at the forefront of providing technological solutions to protect privacy.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Emphasized in the security white paper explaining the implementation of the technology is the encryption of both forms of communication – one-to-one and group and also of all types of messages shared within such communications – text as well as media.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Simply put, all communication taking place over WhatsApp would be decipherable only to the sender and recipient – it would be virtual gibberish even to WhatsApp.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">This announcement came in the backdrop of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/17/apple-ordered-to-hack-iphone-of-san-bernardino-shooter-for-fbi">Apple locking horns with the FBI</a> after being asked to provide a backdoor to unlock the San Bernardino mass shooter’s iPhone. This further reinforced WhatsApp Inc’s stand on the ensuing debate between the interplay of privacy and security in the digital age.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Kudos to WhatsApp, for there is <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/FreedomOpinion/Pages/CallForSubmission.aspx">growing discussion</a> around how encryption and anonymity is central to enabling secure online communication which in turn is integral to essential human rights such as those of freedom of opinion and expression.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp may have taken encryption to the masses, but here we outline why WhatsApp’s provisioning of privacy and security measures needs a more granular analysis – is the company doing what it claims to be doing? Security issues with WhatsApp’s messaging protocol certainly are not new.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Man-in-the-middle attacks</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">A <a href="https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/713.pdf">study</a> published by a group of German researchers from Ruhr University highlighted issues with WhatsApp’s implementation of its E2EE protocol to group communications. Another <a href="https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2016/files/36.pdf">paper</a> points out how WhatsApp’s session establishment strategy itself could be problematic and potentially be targeted for what are called man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">An MITM attack takes the form of a malicious actor, as the term suggests, placing itself between the communicating parties to eavesdrop or impersonate. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also <a href="https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/10/where-whatsapp-went-wrong-effs-four-biggest-security-concerns">highlighted</a> other security vulnerabilities, or trade-offs, depending upon ideological inclinations, with respect to WhatsApp allowing for storage of unencrypted backups, issues with WhatsApp’s web client and also with its approach to cryptographic key change notifications.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Much has been written questioning WhatsApp’s shifting approach to ensuring privacy too. Quoting straight from <a href="https://www.whatsapp.com/legal/#privacy-policy-affiliated-companies">WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy:</a> “We joined the Facebook family of companies in 2014. As part of the Facebook family of companies, WhatsApp receives information from, and shares information with, this family of companies.” Speaking of Facebook …</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Culling out larger issues with WhatsApp’s privacy policies is not the intention here. What we specifically seek to explore is right at the nexus of WhatsApp’s security and privacy provisioning clashing with its marketing strategy: the storage of data on WhatsApp’s servers, or ‘blobs,’ as they are referred to in the technical paper. Facebook’s rather. In WhatsApp’s words: “Once your messages (including your chats, photos, videos, voice messages, files and share location information) are delivered, they are deleted from our servers. Your messages are stored on your own device.”</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">In fact, this non-storage of data on their ‘blobs’ is emphasizes at several other points on the official website. Let us call this the deletion-upon-delivery model.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">A simple experiment</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">While drawing up a rigorous proof of concept, made near-impossible thanks to WhatsApp being a closed source messaging protocol, a simple experiment is enough to raise some very pertinent questions about WhatsApp’s outlined deletion-upon-delivery model. It should, however, be mentioned that the Signal Protocol developed by Open Whisper Systems and pivotal in WhatsApp’s rolling out of E2EE is <a href="https://github.com/signalapp">open source</a>. Here is how the experiment proceeds:</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick sends Morty an attachment.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Morty then switches off the data on her mobile device.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick downloads the attachment, an image.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Subsequently, Rick deletes the image from his mobile device’s internal storage.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Rick then logs into a WhatsApp’s web client on his browser. (Prior to this experiment, both Rick and Morty had logged out from all instances of the web client)</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; "><i>Upon a fresh log-in to the web client and opening the chat with Morty, the option to download the image is available to Rick.</i></p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The experiment concludes with bewilderment at WhatsApp’s claim of deletion-upon-delivery as outlined earlier. The only place from which Morty could have downloaded the image would be from Facebook’s ‘blobs.’ The attachment could not have been retrieved from Morty’s mobile device as it had no way of sending data and neither from Rick’s mobile device as it no longer existed in the device’s storage.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As per the Privacy Policy, the data is stored on the ‘blobs’ for a period of 30 days after transmission of a message only when it can’t be delivered to the recipient. Upon delivery, the deletion-upon-delivery model is supposed to kick in.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Another straightforward experiment that leads to a similar conclusion is seeing the difference in time taken for a large attachment to be forwarded as opposed to when the same large attachment is uploaded. Forwarding is palpably quicker than uploading afresh: non-storage of attachments on the ‘blob’ would entail that the same amount should be taken for both.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The plot thickens. WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy goes on to state: “To improve performance and deliver media messages more efficiently, such as when many people are sharing a popular photo or video, we may retain that content on our servers for a longer period of time.” The technical paper offers no help in understanding how WhatsApp systems assess frequently shared encrypted media messages without decrypting it at its end.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">A possible explanation could be the usage of metadata by WhatsApp, which it discloses in its Privacy Policy while simultaneously being sufficiently vague about the specifics of it. That WhatsApp may be capable of reading encrypted communication through the inclusion of a backdoor bodes well for law enforcement, but not so much for unsuspecting users.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The weakest link in the chain</h3>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">Concerns about backdoors in WhatsApp’s product have led the French government to start developing their <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-privacy/france-builds-whatsapp-rival-due-to-surveillance-risk-idUSKBN1HN258">own encrypted messaging service</a>. This will be built using Matrix – an open protocol designed for real-time communication. Indeed, the Privacy Policy lays out that the company “may collect, use, preserve, and share your information if we have a good-faith belief that it is reasonably necessary to respond pursuant to applicable law or regulations, to legal process, or to government requests.”</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">The Signal Protocol is the undisputed gold standard of E2EE implementations. It is the integration with the surrounding functionality that WhatsApp offers which leads to vulnerabilities. After all, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Assuming that the attachments stored on the ‘blobs’ are in encrypted form, indecipherable to all but the intended recipients, this does not pose a privacy risk for the users from a technological point of view.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">However, it is easy lose sight of the fact that the Privacy Policy is a legally binding document and it specifically states that messages are not stored on the ‘blobs’ as a matter of routine. As a side note, WhatsApp’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service are refreshing in their readability and lack of legalese.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As we were putting the final touches to this piece, <a href="https://wabetainfo.com/whatsapp-allows-to-redownload-deleted-media/#more-2781">news from <i>WABetaInfo</i></a>, a well-reputed source of information on WhatsApp features, has broken that newer updates of WhatsApp for Android are permitting users to re-download media deleted up to three months back. WhatsApp cannot possibly achieve this without storing the media in the ‘blobs,’ or in other words, in violation of its Privacy Policy.</p>
<p class="p4" style="text-align: justify; ">As the aphorism goes: “When the service is free, you are the product.”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/asia-times-april-20-2018-aayush-rathi-sunil-abraham-what-s-up-with-whatsapp</a>
</p>
No publisherAayush Rathi and Sunil AbrahamSocial MediaPrivacyInternet GovernanceFeaturedWhatsAppHomepage2018-04-23T16:45:51ZBlog EntryIs This The Beginning Of The End For Facebook?
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-aayush-ailawadi-april-15-2018-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook
<b>After two days of congressional hearings that collectively lasted over ten hours, there are many questions about Facebook, its policies and its future that experts are debating.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Aayush Ailawadi was <a class="external-link" href="https://www.bloombergquint.com/technology/2018/04/15/is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook">published in Bloomberg Quint</a> on April 15, 2018. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Do Facebook’s privacy policies confuse more than they inform? Is the platform a near monopoly that may need to be broken? And how do you ensure that the vast wealth of data that Facebook has is not misused, particularly in elections?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">BloombergQuint has collected views on some of these issues.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Privacy Policy Or Legalese?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Since the Cambrdge Analytica <a href="https://www.bloombergquint.com/quicktakes/2018/03/21/understanding-the-facebook-cambridge-analytica-story-quicktake" target="_blank">scandal came to light</a>, Facebook has been receiving a lot of flak for its ambiguous and verbose privacy and data policy. Lawmakers quizzed founder Mark Zuckerberg about how an ordinary user was expected to decipher the terms of the user agreement, something even some of the lawmakers grilling him couldn’t comprehend.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jitendra Waral of Bloomberg Intelligence says, “It’s so complicated that nobody reads it. Essentially the data sharing beyond the Facebook ecosystem came into question here. Is it just necessary to have data sharing for the service to work? Is it restricted to you sharing your content with your friends in your network or do the restrictions go beyond that? So basically they have a lot of work to do in terms of transparency, in terms how the data is used and shared.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">During the conversations, it also came to light that Facebook collects data even on those who don’t use the platform.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“In general we collect data on people who are not signed up for Facebook for security purposes," Zuckerberg said Wednesday <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-11/zuckerberg-says-facebook-collects-internet-data-on-non-users" target="_blank">in a hearing about the social network’s privacy practices in Washington</a>before the House Energy and Commerce Committee.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While privacy experts and tech geeks have been crying foul for years about the data collection and storage practices adopted by tech behemoths like Facebook, this revelation by the Facebook founder was the first public acknowledgement of the fact.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Is Facebook A Monopoly?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It’s not just data concerns that were brought up at the hearings.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Sen. Lindsey Graham asked Zuckerberg if Facebook enjoys a monopoly on the type of service it provides to its users. He asked, “If I buy a Ford and it doesn’t work well and I don’t like it, I can buy a Chevy, if I’m upset with Facebook, what’s the equivalent product that I can go sign up for?”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Zuckerberg responded to say that there are other tech companies which operate in the same sphere as Facebook does. He offered statistics of how many Americans use different social apps nowadays, in support of his argument that Facebook does not enjoy a monopoly in the tech world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project at the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research says, “ Zuckerberg's answer to who his competitor was kind of comically unsatisfying because there is no competition for Facebook and they do have monopoly power in the United States and in many other countries across the world. ”</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">So one idea is to take Facebook and break it into many other parts that it acquired through previous acquisitions. Instagram would be a powerful competitor to Facebook if it was independent of Facebook. WhatsApp would be a powerful competitor to Facebook if it was an independent competitor to Facebook.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jeff Hauser, Center for Economic and Policy Research</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Time To Regulate The Internet?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another big moment during the testimony was when Zuckerberg conceded that it was only a matter of time before the internet would be regulated.</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">He said, “The internet is growing in importance around the world in people’s lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation.”</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Waral agrees that light touch regulation is the way to prevent a Cambridge Analytica like scandal from occurring again in the future. But, he believes that regulation will only raise costs for a company like Facebook. He explains, “What it does is raise compliance costs through out the ecosystem. So, the impact on Facebook from this is that the company is going to increase expenses due to compliance costs.”</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">The Big Election(s) Year</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">During his testimony, Zuckerberg did acknowledge that a lot needs to be done to ensure data does not get misused, particularly in elections. Concerns about misuse of user data have emerged in countries like the U.S., but also in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last month, the Union Minister for Law and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Zuckerberg that if there was any data theft of Indian users due to Facebook’s data collection practices, he would stop at nothing short of summoning the Facebook founder to India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While Pranesh Prakash, policy director at the Centre For Internet and Society, doesn’t believe the government would actually summon Zuckerberg to India, he says, “One new concern that's valid across the world, where there are limitations put on freedom of expression during times of campaigning and elections, how do they translate online? There is no typical answer to this.”</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">Most of the speech regulations apply to candidates and apply to media platforms, which are largely mass media platforms. Now, social media platforms where individuals express themselves might not be regulated the same way or currently at least aren’t regulated the same way.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh Prakash, Policy Director, Centre For Internet and Society</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh thinks it is time to re-look at the existing election laws which might not prove to be as useful now as they were some time ago.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/copy3_of_Facebook.png" alt="Facebook" class="image-inline" title="Facebook" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hauser thinks Facebook should help users discern between fakes news and a legitimate source of news.</p>
<blockquote style="text-align: justify; ">In the 2016 elections cycle, for fake news, a lot of bots and trolls liked them and they started appearing in the lot of users’ feeds. So the algorithm of Facebook encouraged manipulation. Facebook needs to address these concerns. I don’t think we can trust Facebook if it doesn’t make hard decisions about its algorithms. Right now, Facebook needs to say this is what the algorithm does.</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Jeff Hauser, Center for Economic and Policy Research</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-aayush-ailawadi-april-15-2018-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-quint-aayush-ailawadi-april-15-2018-is-this-the-beginning-of-the-end-for-facebook</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaFacebookInternet Governance2018-04-17T14:44:23ZNews ItemDigital Native: Delete Facebook?
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook
<b>You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/digital-native-delete-facebook-5127198/">published in Indian Express</a> on April 8, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>One fine day, we all woke up and were told that </span><a href="http://indianexpress.com/about/facebook/">Facebook</a><span> sold our data to Cambridge Analytica and then they made dastardly profiles of us to target us with advertisement and political propaganda, so, we made a beeline for #DeleteFacebook. The most surprising part about the expose is how much of a non-event it is. We have been warned, at least since the Edward Snowden revelations, if not earlier, that our data is the new oil, coal and gold. It is being used as a resource, it is being mined from our everyday digital transactions, and it is precious because it can result in a massive social engineering without our consent or knowledge. Ever since Facebook started expanding its domain from being a friends-poke-friends-with-livestock website, we have been warned that the ambition of Facebook was never to connect you with your friends but to be your friend.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>Time and again, we have been told that the sapient Facebook algorithm remembers everything you say and do, anticipates all your future needs, and listens to the most banal litany of your life. More than your mom, your partner or your shrink, it’s the Facebook algorithm which is interested in all your quotidian uselessness. It is not the stranger who accesses your post that should worry you. The biggest perpetrator of privacy violations on Facebook is Facebook itself. There is good reason why a company that offers its prime products for free is valuated as one of the richest corporations in the world. The product of Facebook – it has always been known – is us.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>Why, then, are we suddenly taken aback at the fact that Facebook sold us? And while we are sharing our thoughts (ironically on Facebook) about deleting our profiles, the question that remains is this: How much of your digital life are you willing to erase? Because, and I am sorry if this pricks your filter bubble, Facebook’s problem is not really a Facebook problem. It is almost the entire World Wide Web, where we lost the battle for data ownership and platform openness more than two decades ago. Name one privately owned free service that you use on the internet and I will show you the section in its “terms and services” where you have surrendered your data. In fact, you can’t even find government services, tied up with their private partners, where your data is safe and stored in privacy vaults where it won’t be abused.</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span><span>It is time to realise that the popular ’90s meme “All your base are belong to us” is the lived reality of our digital lives. As we forego ownership for convenience, as our governments sold our sovereignty for profits, and as digital corporations became behemoths that now have the capacity to challenge and write our constitutional and fundamental rights, we are waking up to a battle that has already been fought and resolved. A large part of our physical hardware to access the internet is privately owned. This means that almost all our PCs, tablets, phones, servers are owned and open to exploitation by private companies. Every time your phone does an automatic update or your PC goes into house-cleaning mode, you have to realise that you are being stored, somewhere in the cloud in ways that you cannot imagine.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span><span><span>It is tiring to hear this alarm and panic around Facebook’s data trading. Not only is it legal, it is something that has been happening for a while, most of us have been aware of it, and we have resolutely ignored it because, you know, cute cats. If somebody tells you that they are against privately owned physical property and are going to start a revolution to take away all private property and make it equally shared with the public, you would laugh at them because they are arriving at the battle scene after the war is over. This digital wokeness trend to #DeleteFacebook is the digital equivalent of that moment. If you want to fight, fight the governments and nations who can still protect us. Participate in conversations around Internet governance. Take responsibility to educate yourself about the politics of how the digital world operates. But stop trying to feel virtuous because you pulled out of a social media network, pretending that that is the end of the problem.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook</a>
</p>
No publishernishantSocial MediaPrivacyInternet GovernanceFacebookResearchers at Work2018-05-06T03:08:25ZBlog EntryCambridge Analytica scandal: How India can save democracy from Facebook
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-march-28-2018-sunil-abraham-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-india-can-save-democracy-from-facebook
<b>Hegemonic incumbents like Google and Facebook need to be tackled with regulation; govt should use procurement power to fund open source alternatives.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-india-can-save-democracy-from-facebook-118032800146_1.html">Business Standard</a> on March 28, 2018</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><em>The Cambridge Analytica scandal came to light when <a class="storyTags" href="http://www.business-standard.com/search?type=news&q=whistleblower" target="_blank">whistleblower </a>Wylie accused Cambridge Analytica of gathering details of 50 million Facebook users. Cambridge Analytica used this data to psychologically profile these users and manipulated their opinion in favour of Donald Trump. BJP and Congress have accused each other of using the services of Cambridge Analytica in India as well. How can India safeguard the democratic process against such intervention? The author tries to answer this question in this Business Standard Special.</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><em></em></strong>Those that celebrate the big data/artificial intelligence moment claim that traditional approaches to data protection are no longer relevant and therefore must be abandoned. The Cambridge Analytica episode, if anything, demonstrates how wrong they are. The principles of data protection need to be reinvented and weaponized, not discarded. In this article I shall discuss the reinvention of three such data protection principles. Apart from this I shall also briefly explore competition law solutions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><em>Collect data only if mandated by regulation</em></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong><em></em></strong>One, data minimization is the principle that requires the data controller to collect data only if mandated to do so by regulation or because it is a prerequisite for providing a functionality. For example, Facebook’s messenger app on Android harvests call records and meta-data, without any consumer facing feature on the app that justifies such collection. Therefore, this is a clear violation of the data minimization principle. One of the ways to reinvent this principle is by borrowing from the best practices around warnings and labels on packaging introduced by the global anti-tobacco campaign. A permanent bar could be required in all apps, stating ‘Facebook holds W number of records across X databases over the time period Y, which totals Z Gb’. Each of these alphabets could be a hyperlink, allowing the user to easily drill down to the individual data record.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong>Consent must be explicit, informed and voluntary</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong></strong></em>Two, the principle of consent requires that the data controller secure explicit, informed and voluntary consent from the data subject unless there are exceptional circumstances. Unfortunately, consent has been reduced to a mockery today through obfuscation by lawyers in verbose “privacy notices” and “terms of services”. To reinvent consent we need to bring ‘Do Not Dial’ registries into the era of big data. A website maintained by the future Indian data protection regulator could allow individuals to check against their unique identifiers (email, phone number, Aadhaar). The website would provide a list of all data controllers that are holding personal information against a particular unique identifier. The data subject should then be able to revoke consent with one-click. Once consent is revoked, the data controller would have to delete all personal information that they hold, unless retention of such information is required under law (for example, in banking law). One-click revocation of consent will make data controllers like Facebook treat data subjects with greater respect.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong>There must be a right to </strong></em><em><strong>explanation</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong></strong></em>Three, the right to explanation, most commonly associated with the General Data Protection Directive from the EU, is a principle that requires the data controller to make transparent the automated decision-making process when personal information is implicated. So far it has been seen as a reactive measure for user empowerment. In other words, the explanation is provided only when there is a demand for it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Facebook feeds that were used for manipulation through micro-targeting of content is an example of such automated decision making. Regulation in India should require a user empowerment panel accessible through a prominent icon that appears repeatedly in the feed. On clicking the icon the user will be able to modify the objectives that the algorithm is maximizing for. She can then choose to see content that targets a bisexual rather than a heterosexual, a Muslim rather than a Hindu, a conservative rather a liberal, etc. At the moment, Facebook only allows the user to stop being targeted for advertisements based on certain categories. However, to be less susceptible to psychological manipulation, the user should be allowed to define these categories, for both content and advertisements.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong>How to fix the business model?</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong></strong></em>From a competition perspective, Google and Facebook have destroyed the business model for real news, and replaced it with a business model for fake news, by monopolizing digital advertising revenues. Their algorithms are designed to maximize the amount of time that users spend on their platforms, and therefore, don’t have any incentive to distinguish between truth and falsehood. This contemporary crisis requires three types of interventions: one, appropriate taxation and transparency to the public, so that the revenue streams for fake news factories can be ended; two, the construction of a common infrastructure that can be shared by all traditional and new media companies in order to recapture digital advertising revenues; and three, immediate action by the competition regulator to protect competition between advertising networks operating in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong>The Google challenge</strong></em></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><em><strong></strong></em>With Google, the situation is even worse, since Google has dominance in both the ad network market and in the operating system market. During the birth of competition law, policy-makers and decision-makers acted to protect competition per se. This is because they saw competition as an essential component of democracy, open society, innovation, and a functioning market. When the economists from the Chicago school began to influence competition policy in the USA, they advocated for a singular focus on the maximization of consumer interest. The adoption of this ideology has resulted in competition regulators standing powerlessly by while internet giants wreck our economy and polity. We need to return to the foundational principles of competition law, which might even mean breaking Google into two companies. The operating system should be divorced from other services and products to prevent them from taking advantage of vertical integration. We as a nation need to start discussing the possible end stages of such a breakup.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In conclusion, all the fixes that have been listed above require either the enactment of a data protection law, or the amendment of our existing competition law. This, as we all know, can take many years. However, there is an opportunity for the government to act immediately if it wishes to. By utilizing procurement power, the central and state governments of India could support free and open source software alternatives to Google’s products especially in the education sector. The government could also stop using Facebook, Google and Twitter for e-governance, and thereby stop providing free advertising for these companies for print and broadcast media. This will make it easier for emerging firms to dislodge hegemonic incumbents.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-march-28-2018-sunil-abraham-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-india-can-save-democracy-from-facebook'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/business-standard-march-28-2018-sunil-abraham-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-india-can-save-democracy-from-facebook</a>
</p>
No publishersunilSocial MediaFacebookInternet GovernancePrivacy2018-03-28T15:44:00ZBlog EntryData Breach: How will the biggest scandal that Facebook is mired in affect its credibility in India?
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-g-seetharaman-shephali-bhatt-march-25-2018-data-breach-how-will-the-biggest-scandal-that-facebook-is-mired-in-affect-its-credibility-in-india
<b>Facebook has not been able to catch a break lately. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by G. Seetharaman and Shephali Bhatt with additional inputs by Indulekha Aravind was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/data-breach-how-will-the-biggest-scandal-that-facebook-is-mired-in-affect-its-credibility-in-india/articleshow/63446048.cms">Economic Times</a> on March 26, 2018. Sunil Abraham was quoted.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Rebuked for the misinformation spread on its platform by Russian agencies during the 2016 US presidential election, aiding Donald Trump’s victory, Facebook was on the defensive for most of 2017. Making matters worse for the Menlo Park, California-headquartered social media behemoth, another one of its past oversights has now come back to haunt it in what is undoubtedly its biggest public relations challenge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Reports by the New York Times and the Observer of London on March 17 disclosed that a researcher linked to Cambridge Analytica (CA), a political consulting firm that worked on Trump’s campaign, had accessed details of 50 million Facebook users unbeknownst to them and shared it with CA, which uses online data to reach voters on social media with personalised messages. The reports were based on revelations by whistle-blower Christopher Wylie, who had worked with CA.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This is how it unfolded: in 2014, CA hired Aleksandr Kogan, a Soviet-born American citizen, to mine data on US voters on Facebook, through a personality quiz app. It was downloaded by 2,70,000 users, who logged in with their Facebook credentials. That enabled Kogan to access not just their data on Facebook, but also their friends’ profiles. Facebook says Kogan lied that the data was only for his research, while there was a commercial element to it as CA paid for the app. It is unclear at this point how exactly the data was used or whether it was effective.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Future of Facebook" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446106/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In 2015, Facebook removed his app and sought an assurance from him that the data had been destroyed. But it later found out that the information had been passed on to CA. Facebook has since stopped apps from accessing information about a user’s friends and has even limited the data that can be collected about the user.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the broad details of the issue have been known since 2015, the sheer number of accounts that were compromised was not known till now and has led to calls for Facebook to be deleted, with #DeleteFacebook trending on Twitter. The company, one of the world’s most valuable public companies, has shed $75 billion, or 14% of its market value, since March 16.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As Facebook spends the next few months trying to convince its users that their data is safe, India will be crucial to their plans. India is, after all, its largest market, with 250 million monthly active users, 12% of its global base, according to recent data by We Are Social and Hootsuite, firms involved in social media marketing and management, respectively.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There are other reasons why India is important to Facebook: WhatsApp, the country’s chat app of choice, has 200 million users, again more than any other market, and Instagram has 53 million. Both these apps are owned by Facebook, giving the company an outsize role in how Indians communicate.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Experts" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446138/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook will only grow as smartphone and internet adoption grows — India is set to add 100 million internet users and 250 million smartphone users by 2020. But at the same time, it has to deal with those wondering whether they should sign up or continue being on the network.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Soumya Sinha, a 32-year-old data consultant in Delhi, says FB is quite passive-aggressive when it comes to data. “It gives you a lot of privacy options, makes you feel you are in control of your wall, but buries an ‘unless you don’t want to share’ option at the bottom,” he says. “If you don’t opt out, it assumes you are happy to share. Even if you do, you can never be sure the non-consensual sharing has stopped.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Privacy controls — not just on Facebook but on social media platforms in general — are not easy to find and even the most tech-savvy have a hard time ensuring the accounts are as secure as they can possibly be. “Indians are very liberal with others accessing their data. A lot of other accounts are linked to my FB account. Who knows which one of them will provide my data to others?” says Prateek Kharangar, a 30-year-old doctor in Rajasthan.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s billionaire chief executive, issued a statement on March 21 admitting that Facebook had made mistakes. He added that Facebook would do a thorough audit of suspicious apps and make its privacy policy stricter by limiting the user information it shares with third-party apps.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook will also revoke permission to apps that a user has not accessed for three months and show an option at the top of the news feed, allowing users to do the same. Zuckerberg also said in a subsequent interview to the New York Times that Facebook would let concerned users know about the CA debacle. Questions sent by ET Magazine to Facebook India went unanswered. The US Federal Trade Commission and the European Union are also scrutinising the issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Stock" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446140/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Protect Data</strong> <br />Facebook has faced criticism in the past, including about its facial recognition software In India, it was badly bruised in its fight against net neutrality. Its Free Basics campaign tried to push free access to a few websites, including its own, in partnership with telcos, but the telecom regulator in February 2016 ruled in favour of net neutrality. Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, believes sites like Facebook should periodically inform users about the data the apps have access to. “Facebook should also ask you every quarter if you want to revoke permission. It’s required in countries where users are naive, unaware and incapable of protecting their own interests.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Many experts call for more transparency and clarity. Nayantara Ranganathan, programme manager at the Internet Democracy Project, says privacy policies are tweaked constantly and the changes the companies want us to know about are conveyed through blog posts and such, while there may be changes that we may not be aware of. Nikhil Pahwa, cofounder, Internet Freedom Foundation, says the process of notifying users of changes in terms and conditions needs to be improved. “So often, T&Cs are changed and the company just sends a generic mail to all its users. If they don’t respond, it is assumed they have agreed to the changes. That needs to change.” Some believe online consent agreements are being simplified.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While there have been calls for the privacy notice to be in local languages too, Rama Vedashree, CEO of Data Security Council of India, says that in markets like India, where millions are just being introduced to the internet, websites may have to look at pictorial representations to explain how user data will be used by third-party developers. Regardless of how intelligible tech companies make their privacy policy documents, given the number of websites we use, it is impossible to read every site’s terms. That is where a stringent law becomes necessary. “We don’t have a robust legal framework that acts swiftly, permits class action lawsuits and awards damages in tune with the harm incurred,” says Mishi Choudhary, legal director at the Software Freedom Law Center.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WHY FB CAN'T TAKE DATA SECURITY LIGHTLY IN INDIA</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="1" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446196/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="2" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446203/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Source: Facebook, WhatsApp, We Are Social and Hootsuite, Ministry of Communications, Internet and Mobile Association of India</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Abraham says presently only data security is covered under the Information Technology Act, 2000. “A mere infringement of your privacy without financial loss does not allow you to seek remedy.” However, India could have a data protection law sooner than later. A committee was appointed by the government last year to come up with a draft law, an important part of which will be a data protection authority. The Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling last year in a case related to Aadhaar, said privacy is a fundamental right.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will come into effect in May, could be emulated in countries, including India. It makes tech companies more accountable for the privacy of those who use their services and has penalties up to £20 million, or 4% of the errant company’s global annual revenues, whichever is higher. This forced Facebook to put all of its privacy settings in one place in January.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“India must go further than Europe did with its General Data Protection Regulation, which requires companies to get unambiguous consent from users to collect data, to clearly disclose how personal data are being used, and to spell out why data is being collected. It must also ban any form of political advertising and the sale of data to third parties,” wrote Vivek Wadhwa, a tech entrepreneur and academic, in a column in ET on Friday.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="Controversy" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63446260/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In light of this controversy, there will be pressure on the government to hasten the process of introducing a data protection law, accompanied by a regulator. It is likely the draft document will draw on the European regulation. “The more we adopt from EU GDPR, the better,” says Pahwa, adding that users should also have the right to removal of personal data.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT and law minister, has warned Facebook of stringent action if it is found influencing elections “through undesirable means”. The Indian government on Friday issued a notice to Cambridge Analytica asking if any entities engaged its services to harvest data of Indian Facebook users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">India could also take a leaf out of Germany’s playbook while enforcing data protection, especially if it involves tech companies that dominate the segment they operate in, like Google in search and Facebook in social media. Germany’s competition watchdog in December accused Facebook of abusing its dominant position to get users’ consent to access their data from third-party websites. The Competition Commission of India in February imposed a penalty of `136 crore on Google for abusing its dominant position in search to create a bias to favour its own services.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Messing Up Elections?</strong> <br />The ongoing controversy has been exacerbated by the fact that besides data privacy, electoral politics is at the centre of the issue. CA dug itself into a deeper hole when footage emerged of a UK television channel’s sting operation, in which the company’s top officials talk about using bribes and women to entrap their clients’ political opponents. CA has since suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, who was in the video. CA is partly funded by conservative US billionaire Robert Mercer, and Trump’s former White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon served on its board.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The issue has had political ramifications in India, with both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party and opposition Congress trading charges about each other’s association with CA. The BJP has attacked the Congress by quoting news reports of talks between CA and the Congress ahead of the 2019 general election, while the Congress has hit back with a reference to the 2010 Bihar election on the CA website. The company claims that it worked on the Bihar election, reportedly through its parent Strategic Communication Laboratories, by identifying swing voters.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Our client achieved a landslide victory, with over 90% of total seats targeted by CA being won,” says the website. The JD(U)-BJP combine was the victorious coalition. Interestingly, the company’s India partner, Ovleno Business Intelligence, is run by Amrish Tyagi, son of JD(U) leader KC Tyagi. When contacted by ET Magazine, Amrish Tyagi declined to comment. Both the Congress and the BJP have denied any ties to CA.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“We have been on social media as long as social media was around and we have always been ethical in our conduct,” says Amit Malviya, head of BJP’s IT Cell. Divya Spandana, who heads the social media team for the Congress, says the party does not engage external agencies. “We only use data with the consent of the individual, emails are subscribed to and WhatsApp is through people who have signed up to receive messages.” The BJP made good use of social media in its 2014 campaign, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi and most of his cabinet are quite active on Twitter.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="India" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63447364/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp will play an even bigger role in the upcoming assembly polls and the 2019 general election, WhatsApp perhaps more so than the other two, given its popularity and user engagement. “What makes WhatsApp worse than Facebook is Facebook knows what’s being sent around (on its platform). If it comes up with a fake news mitigation strategy, it might work. WhatsApp doesn’t know what’s being sent on its platform,” says Abraham.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In his New York Times interview, Zuckerberg said that after the US presidential election, Facebook developed artificial intelligence tools to identify fake accounts and fake news, which were deployed during the French presidential polls in 2017. “This is a massive focus for us to make sure we’re dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important,” he was quoted as saying. Both government authorities and the Election Commission of India will keep a close watch on how social media is used in poll campaigns.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><img alt="1" src="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/img/63447378/Master.jpg" /></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While things do not look up for Facebook in the immediate future, some think it will get past the issue. Vineet Sehgal, chief marketing officer of Quikr, says while marketers will take a hard look at Facebook, the company will act swiftly to change its policies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"There is too much at stake." More and more Indians are using social media, in addition to searching for information on the internet, buying things on ecommerce sites, booking app-based cabs, and making payments and transfers on online payment platforms. They will also buy more devices, including wearables and smart speakers, which gather large amounts of data. So naturally, it is imperative that the sanctity of that data become a top priority for tech companies, consumers and the government. "The emphasis of any (data protection) law needs to be protecting people, not data. Our legislators should ask about relationships of all entities with social media and data analytics companies," says Choudhary of Software Freedom Law Center.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-g-seetharaman-shephali-bhatt-march-25-2018-data-breach-how-will-the-biggest-scandal-that-facebook-is-mired-in-affect-its-credibility-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-g-seetharaman-shephali-bhatt-march-25-2018-data-breach-how-will-the-biggest-scandal-that-facebook-is-mired-in-affect-its-credibility-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaInternet Governance2018-03-27T02:09:41ZNews ItemIs Facebook too powerful without legal safeguards?
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-march-24-2018-vidhi-choudhary-is-facebook-too-powerful-without-legal-safeguards
<b>The absence of a data protection law and a competition watchdog to oversee Internet companies are key shortcomings, according to some experts.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Vidhi Choudhary was published in<a class="external-link" href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/tech/is-facebook-too-powerful-without-legal-safeguards/story-NBdkYAPa421zrWpLPZlwQI.html"> Hindustan Times</a> on March 24, 2018</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">It’s time India moves to put in place legal safeguards to contain the potential harm that Internet giants like Facebook Inc. can cause, experts say, amid a raging scandal over access gained by political marketing firm Cambridge Analytica to user data on the social media network. India is a key market for Facebook with 217 million people using the platform every month.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Concerns centre around protection of user privacy and freedom of speech, harassment by Internet trolls, spread of misinformation and fake news, said Apar Gupta, a Delhi-based lawyer who is part of Save The Internet , a group of individuals and non-government organisations fighting to preserve net neutrality. It’s time to take stock of the concerns and the sufficiency of India’s legal framework to address them, Gupta said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Companies like Facebook have grown too big and too powerful without adequate legal safeguards,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On Thursday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/facebook-boosting-security-features-ahead-of-elections-in-india-brazil-mark-zuckerberg/story-NTwFWoDFw65Q7yukIzwEvM.html">Zuckerberg pledged to stop the misuse of user data</a> on its site to manipulate voters in India,Brazil and the US. The social media network is under scrutiny after a whistleblower alleged that London-based Cambridge Analytica accessed user data to prepare voter profiles that helped Donald Trump win the US presidential election in 2016.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Information technology and law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday <a href="https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/govt-says-congress-has-hired-cambridge-analytica-for-2019-campaign-warns-facebook-against-interfering-in-polls/story-MeTgtVU6RAIGw1WEU4PVaL.html">warned social media platforms</a> such as Facebook of “stringent action” in case of any attempt to sway the country’s electoral process. The government is considering a new regulatory framework for online content, including on social media and websites, Union minister for information and broadcasting Smriti Irani said on 17 March at the News18 Rising India Summit , conceding that the law is not clear about online news and broadcast content.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“We remain strongly committed to protecting people’s information. We have announced that we are planning to introduce improvements to our settings and give people more prominent controls ,” an India-based Facebook spokesperson said in response to an emailed query from Hindustan Times .” We have a lot of work to do to regain people’s trust and are working hard to tackle past abuse, prevent future abuse and will continue to engage with the Election Commission of India and relevant stakeholders to answer any questions they may have.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The absence of a data protection law and a competition watchdog to oversee Internet companies are key shortcomings, said Sunil Abraham, founder of the think tank Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Evil is a function of power. As internet giants get bigger and bigger, they’ll become more and more evil. In fact, in jurisdictions like India, where we don’t have a data protection law and a sufficiently agile competition commission to take on these Internet giants, they can do whatever they want to..,” said Abraham.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Internet networks have helped undermine the business model for real news and replace it with a vibrant fake news model, in the process cornering the lion’s share of the digital advertising revenue, said Abraham . Facebook and Google dominate the Rs 9,490 crore digital advertising market in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Since they don’t see themselves as a media company, their primary objective is to maximize the amount of time their users spend on the platform,” he said, adding that social media networks aren’t concerned whether the content they present is the truth or lies</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“It would be laziness on our part to just blame Facebook and then feel morally superior. We have to regulate them using competition law and a data protection law so that they behave themselves on our jurisdiction,” Abraham said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The legal framework for Indian social media users is limited. Section 43 (A) of the IT Act operates merely as a data security law applicable only to someone whose privacy has been infringed and can demonstrate that he/she has suffered a financial loss in the process.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“Whatever is known from the Cambridge Analytica episode is that none of the users have lost money or property but democracy has been undermined. So we cannot use the IT Act in India to save our democracy,” he said.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook operates in an opaque manner in the manner in which it regulates content, said Geeta Seshu, consulting editor for media website The Hoot.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“When complaints are launched, they are upheld if they meet Facebook’s so-called community standards. Often users who are dissenting voices against hate or discrimination or misogyny have found themselves blocked. The process to appeal back to Facebook is very arbitrary. Users spend months and years being blocked on the platform. Facebook manipulates user data, when it decides to use algorithms to push content or boost certain articles for a certain sum of money,” she added.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In December, Alex Hardiman, head of news products at Facebook, said restoring trust and credibility to news on Facebook is one of the biggest priorities for the company.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">“There is a lot that we are doing to make sure that we eradicate any false news or misinformation on Facebook. We’ve found that false news is actually a very small percentage of content. But there were a lot of financial motivations for posting false news,” she said in an interview to Mint when he was in Delhi to attend the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit. “So, one of the first things we have done is remove any financial incentives. We have also done a lot to make sure we can quickly identify and remove fake accounts. Also, we have been doing a lot to better understand clickbait content and train classifiers to identify and downlink it.We have also started third-party fact-checking. We have partnered with third-party organizations in the US, France, Germany and a few other countries,” said Hardiman.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-march-24-2018-vidhi-choudhary-is-facebook-too-powerful-without-legal-safeguards'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-march-24-2018-vidhi-choudhary-is-facebook-too-powerful-without-legal-safeguards</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminSocial MediaInternet Governance2018-03-25T01:38:57ZNews ItemSuicide videos: Facebook beefs up team to monitor content
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-kim-arora-may-5-2017-suicide-videos-facebook-beefs-up-team-to-monitor-content
<b>Responding to the spate of suicides being livestreamed, social media giant Facebook has announced it will add another 3,000 people to its 4,500-strong review team that moderates content. The review team will also work in tandem with law enforcement agencies on this issue. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Kim Arora was <a class="external-link" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/suicide-videos-facebook-beefs-up-team-to-monitor-content/articleshow/58523818.cms">published in the Times of India</a> on May 5, 2017.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Over the last few weeks, we've seen people hurting themselves and others on Facebook, either live or in video posted later. It's heartbreaking, and I've been reflecting on how we can do better for our community," Facebook co-founder and CEO <a class="key_underline" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Mark-Zuckerberg">Mark Zuckerberg</a> wrote in a status update and added, "Over the next year, we'll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world, on top of the 4,500 we have today, to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly." <br /> <br /> "...we'll keep working with local community groups and law enforcement who are in the best position to help someone if they need it, either because they're about to harm themselves, or because they're in danger from someone else," Zuckerberg added announcing the move.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Over the last year, several violent incidents and suicides have been streamed live on Facebook. In India last April, a young student went live on Facebook minutes before he jumped off the 19th floor of Taj Lands End hotel in Mumbai. The same month saw similar news coming out of the US and Thailand as well. A 49-year-old from Alabama went live on Facebook before shooting himself in the head. Another man from Bangkok made a video of hanging his 11-month-old daughter, and uploaded it to Facebook. He was later discovered to have killed himself too.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"It's a positive development that Facebook is adding human power and tools for dealing with hate speech, child abuse and suicide attempts. It would be interesting to see how Facebook coordinates with the Indian police departments to get an emergency response to a potential suicide attempt or attempt to harm someone else," says Rohini Lakshane, program officer, <a class="key_underline" href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/topic/Center-for-Internet-and-Society">Center for Internet and Society</a>, though she warns against false reports clogging up reviewers' feeds and police notifications.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On Facebook, a video, picture or any other piece of content reaches the review team after it is reported by users for flouting its "community guidelines".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Chinmayi Arun, research director at the Centre for Communication Governance, National Law University, Delhi, says Facebook must be transparent about this process. "Facebook should also announce how it is keeping this process accountable. It is a public platform of great importance which has been guilty of over-censorship in the past. It should be responsive not just to government censorship requests but also to user requests to review and reconsider its blocking of legitimate content," she says.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-kim-arora-may-5-2017-suicide-videos-facebook-beefs-up-team-to-monitor-content'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-times-of-india-kim-arora-may-5-2017-suicide-videos-facebook-beefs-up-team-to-monitor-content</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaInternet Governance2017-05-20T02:59:14ZNews ItemFaking it on WhatsApp: How India's favourite messaging app is turning into a rumour mill
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-samarth-bansal-faking-it-on-whatsapp-how-india-s-favourite-messaging-app-turned-into-a-rumour-mill
<b>Spreading fast and wild on WhatsApp fake news about riots, ‘miracle’ currency</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Samarth Bansal was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/faking-it-on-whatsapp-how-india-s-favourite-messaging-app-turned-into-a-rumour-mill/story-QAkM4RnF3NeeulOXlFDyUK.html">published in the Hindustan Times</a> on May 19, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">It didn’t take long after demonetisation for almost everyone to hear about the ‘special properties’ of the new Rs 2000 note, which was said to include a ‘built-in GPS-enabled nano-chip’. News of this high-tech feature spread rapidly, even though there was no notification about it from the Reserve Bank of India or any other government department. What there was, instead, was a popular WhatsApp message.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp messages were involved in another fake-news controversy the very same month, when word of a <b><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/clashes-in-delhi-over-salt-shortage-rumours-panic-buying-in-ncr-towns/story-9xNUxTkCG0xB1vMA16QUeI.html" shape="rect" target="_blank">salt shortage in North India</a></b> spread widely. The fake news unleashed panic, and in Hyderabad, among other places, salt prices increased by a factor of four. It even extracted a victim, a woman died in Bakarganj Bazaar, Kanpur, when she slipped and fell into a drain in a panicked buying melee.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This isn’t the only time that fake news that circulated on WhatsApp led to violence. In 2013, messages sent on WhatsApp helped to <b><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/delhi-news/107-killed-in-riots-this-year-66-muslims-41-hindus/story-uqHMNT093ZqMa0WAsWdIpJ.html" shape="rect" target="_blank">incite riots</a></b> in Muzaffarnagar. A two-year old video of a lynching in Pakistan was mischievously promoted as an attack on two Hindu boys by Muslims in Kawal village of Muzaffarnagar. The video, in turn, provoked calls for revenge. Though the police blocked the video on the internet, its spread could not be stopped on the app.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Facebook, WhatsApp’s parent company, has <b><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/analysis/not-just-fake-news-facebook-is-a-bad-news-platform-by-design/story-Sbzz467SZHcUtooErKzOjL.html" shape="rect" target="_blank">faced much flak</a></b> for not curbing the circulation of fake news. On its part, Facebook has now said it will try to flag questionable news stories with the help of users and external fact checkers to cope with this problem.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But the instant messaging app poses similar challenges in a particularly intractable form. WhatsApp offers a particularly private medium of communication, something many people like about it. A <b><a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/supreme-court-questions-whatsapp-s-move-to-tweak-privacy-policy/story-gI8k4AVWptqF9IbJrLgGBI.html" shape="rect" target="_blank">case</a></b> currently being heard at the Supreme Court of India concerns the protection of this very quality — while WhatsApp would like to allow Facebook to access its user data, a PIL contends that this move would be a violation of privacy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The same factors of WhatsApp’s design that protect its users also make it difficult or impossible to study many aspects of communication on the platform. Even as anecdotal evidence piles up that WhatsApp is being used to distribute fake news, then, it remains hard to know just what is happening or what can be done in response.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Facebook vs WhatsApp</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The differences between WhatsApp and Facebook dictate the ways people share news on each platform. “Facebook is a social platform where people express their concerns, react, and build perceptions based on an individual’s posts,” says Anoop Mishra, a digital marketing and social media consultant. “However, on WhatsApp, which is an end-to-end messaging platform, people share content in a more personal and closed way.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">It is because the primary mode of sharing on instant messaging apps is one-to-one, as opposed to the one-to-many relationship on Facebook, that the former feels more personal. This personal quality of most of the content shared directly or on small groups via WhatsApp carries with it the implicit endorsement of people you know. Given that the app is now a large and growing part of people’s lives on mobile devices, the way it influences news consumption demands more attention. “Lack of content moderation and privacy controls gives WhatsApp an edge over Facebook for sharing any type of multimedia content,” says Mishra.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For instance, to get your friends’ attention on Facebook, you need to tag them. Not every post by every friend shows up on your news feed; what you see is dictated by an algorithm. WhatsApp has a big advantage here since it works like a text message. You know that your message will be received by everyone you send it to.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>A black hole for content</b></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is no non-anecdotal way to track the spread of content on WhatsApp. Facebook, for instance, is compatible with analytics tools capable of determining that a particular news report has been shared 7,000 times, say, or viewed 20,000 times.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Such analysis is not feasible with WhatsApp, which offers no way to mine social media data to understand the patterns, trends, or reach of any given message. Even its original source is completely opaque. What is true of particular texts also applies to the total sum of activity on WhatsApp: it is impossible to determine what kinds of messages the public is sharing most, what sorts of conditions people are sharing these messages in, or where in the world they are spreading.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Surpassing one billion</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp arrived in India at the beginning of the decade. At that time, chat apps were generally considered to be interchangeable with text messages. Today they’re widely understood to support sharing of all forms of multimedia content — photos, videos, audio files and even text documents.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Simplicity is one of WhatsApp’s signature virtues. All you need to do is download it: the programme automatically scans your phone book and links up with your contacts who are also users. Crucially, you don’t even need a password. According to Guide to Chat Apps, a report by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, the requirement of a password is “a significant barrier to entry for many people in emerging markets when it comes to other apps and social media platforms.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In February 2016, WhatsApp crossed the one billion mark for active users worldwide. India is its largest market, with about 160 million active users.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>WhatsApping the news</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">WhatsApp’s reach and growing role in the consumption of photos and videos has prompted media companies to take it seriously as a distribution channel. A report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism highlights the increasing adoption of new social networks among young people and the growing importance of recommendations as a gateway to news. “The digital generation expects the news to come to them,” says the report’s author journalist Nic Newman in a press release. “Young people rarely go directly to a mainstream news website anymore.”</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But unlike apps like WeChat and Snapchat, which are gaining currency among millennials, WhatsApp hasn’t positioned itself as a media distribution platform. Media organisations have been experimenting nonetheless. For instance, the BBC ran pilots on WhatsApp and WeChat for the Indian elections in 2014. Users subscribed to the BBC news service on WhatsApp by adding a number to their contacts and sending a request message to join. They were then put on a broadcast list that sent them up to three updates a day in Hindi and English. Many media outlets, including ours, now have a WhatsApp sharing icon on their mobile websites.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For all its susceptibility to the dissemination of fake news, WhatsApp presents unique challenges to the mass sharing of content, just as it does for the mass tracking of it. It has no official application program interface (API), the service which allows programmers to build applications that automate the functions of a platform. “An official WhatsApp API release could spawn an entirely new industry of startups, in much the same way that the release of Twitter’s API did,” says the Tow Center report. “Except this time, it could be even bigger, given WhatsApp’s near-billion account user base.” Reaching out to a wider audience on WhatsApp — with either fake or authentic news — needs to be performed manually, via broadcast lists, which allow you to send the same message to many people at once, and groups.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>State of control</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Fake news might lead only to harmless speculation or minor inconvenience, as it did with rumours about the Rs 2000 note, or it could be dangerous, as was the case during the Muzaffarnagar riots. Pranesh Prakash, a policy director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a research and advocacy group focused on digital technology, believes that social media rumours gain potency after the imposition of censorship, under which people begin to wonder what the government is trying to conceal. “There is no way rumours can be completely quelled,” he says, “but the state can act against rumours through clear communication that calls out particular rumours, and tells people not to believe them.”</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-samarth-bansal-faking-it-on-whatsapp-how-india-s-favourite-messaging-app-turned-into-a-rumour-mill'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindustan-times-samarth-bansal-faking-it-on-whatsapp-how-india-s-favourite-messaging-app-turned-into-a-rumour-mill</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaInternet Governance2017-05-19T14:44:05ZNews ItemA 13-year-old's rape in TN highlights the major threat online sexual grooming poses to children
https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsminute-may-6-2017-a-13-year-olds-rape-in-tn-highlights-the-major-threat-online-sexual-grooming-poses-to-children
<b>Predatory paedophiles online pose a major threat to children who form 7% of internet users in India. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The blog post by Priyanka Thirumurthy was published by <a class="external-link" href="http://www.thenewsminute.com/article/13-year-old-s-rape-tn-highlights-major-threat-online-sexual-grooming-poses-children-61591">News Minute</a> on May 6, 2017. Pranesh Prakash was quoted.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was a usual practice, for 13-year-old Meena* from Tirupur to log into her father's Facebook account when she came home from school. While she was scrolling through his timeline one day, she received and accepted a friend request from a profile named Siva Idiot on Facebook. When this 'new friend' sent her a “hi” on chat, the young girl found no reason to ignore this message. Over the next 10 days, they chatted incessantly and she revealed all her personal details - where she lived, studied, who her parents were and even her phone number. Siva Idiot then proceeded to begin calling her on a mobile phone and their conversations lasted hours.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Meanwhile, miffed by her lack of focus on her studies, Meena's parents often chastised her and threatened to take away her laptop and mobile phone. An upset Meena proceeded to complain to Siva Idiot about the 'problems' she faced, who provided emotional support to the teenager. He even offered to come meet her outside her home.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Meena's parents were out in their offices till 8pm every day and Siva Idiot knew this. He met Meena outside her home, when she was still upset about her parents' advice. Her 'friend' then convinced the teenager to leave her house and marry him. Fifteen days after she first spoke to him on Facebook, 13-year-old Meena ran away from home to 'get married' to 22-year-old Ibrahim.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Online sexual grooming</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This is a classic case of sexual grooming," says Vidya Reddy, of Tulir, Centre for Prevention and Healing of Child Sexual Abuse. "Abusers study a situation carefully to understand what a child's Achilles heel is and then exploit the situation. Now, with almost every child having accesses to technology and internet in the form of a laptop or phone, these criminals have found new platforms to target children," she adds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">What Vidya explains is called online sexual grooming, a worldwide phenomenon, that has spread along with the speed and easy access to the internet. According to UNICEF, it can be defined as preparing a child or adult for sexual abuse, exploitation or ideological manipulation. A report released by the organisation in 2014 states that the surge in mobile and internet usage in India had brought 400 million people online. Of this, seven percent of internet users in the country are reportedly children.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"Phones are now an extension of our hands and it has completely changed the way crime is committed and presented, " Vidya notes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Even a report of the Parliamentary Committee on Information Technology in 2014 recognized the threat posed to children by predatory paedophiles online. It emphasises how these predators "conceal their true identity whilst using the internet to ‘groom’ potential victims for sexual purposes."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>From home to horror</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Meena too was unaware about the identity of the person she was chatting with. In fact, an officer told The News Minute, that it was only when Ibrahim called her on the phone that she even realised she had compromised all her data to an unknown man. But Ibrahim, as the police put it, was too smart for the girl.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"He spoke to her very nicely and formed an emotional connect before she even realised the dangers of the situation," a police officer told The News Minute. "He was just somebody who did odd jobs for a living but his real life was on Facebook. He has close to 5000 friends and they are all young girls," she admits.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On April 27, Ibrahim and Meena made their way to Puducherry, where they took shelter at his friend Prabhakar’s motel. That very night, Meena was allegedly raped. The next morning, Ibrahim's phone somehow came into her possession and when the child surfed through the picture gallery, fresh horror awaited her. It was filled with obscene pictures and videos of young women and children. Shocked, Meena confronted Ibrahim about this and the two got into a loud fight. An angry Ibrahim then abused the teenager who refused to leave with him and abandoned her in the lodge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When the hotel manager and Ibrahim's friend Prabhakaran came to investigate the source of commotion, he found a devastated Meena alone in the room. In an effort to ‘cheer her up’ he took her out to eat and bought her clothes. As Meena changed in the room, Prabhakaran allegedly waited outside to make his move. He went into the room with a yellow thread in hand, and when she was ready, tied it around her neck and declared that they were married. He then proceeded, according to officials, to sexually assault the girl.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Prabhakaran had even mortgaged all her jewellery, given her some money and pocketed the rest. On April 29, the frightened and devastated teenager managed to escape from the lodge and make a call to her house from a nearby bus stop. By then, her parents had already filed a missing girl complaint with the Tirupur North police and were frantically searching for her.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>The need to intervene</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">According to the UNICEF report, India falls largely short in terms of awareness about online child sexual abuse and exploitation. Parents, it claims, are not aware of the risks the internet poses and therefore do not respond effectively to this form of harassment.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"This case shows that parents and schools have to spend more time educating their wards on online safety. In many schools, non- digital safety lessons are imparted such as good touch and bad touch. But when it comes to the internet, they don't even impart basic lessons," says Pranesh Prakash, Director of the Centre for Internet and Society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Pranesh argues that while parents cannot monitor children's activity on the internet the whole day, they can ensure they have a trusting relationship with their children. This he claims will create dialogue on the child's activity on the internet or social media and create awareness.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"In this crime, details shared online, led to an offline meeting. So, children must be taught to not share addresses, personal details or meet such 'friends' without their parents' knowledge." he adds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In India, two major challenges are the lack of a uniform terminology and lacunae in law as far as sexual grooming of children is concerned. Some key legal instruments meant to protect children, predate technological advances. For example, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography does not criminalize online sexual grooming.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Establishing the criminality of sexual grooming or even sexting is difficult in view of the potential for misuse of the law, states the UNICEF report.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Back home and healing</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Following her desperate phone call, Tirupur police rescued Meena, and went on to arrest Ibrahim in Pondicherry on April 30. Prabhakaran was arrested on May 2. They have been booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO) and other sections of the Indian Penal Code. Police are now investigating if Ibrahim and Prabahakaran have been involved in crimes of this nature in the past as well.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">"There is only so much parents can do. They work till eight in the night and children who come back from school at 4pm, have four unsupervised hours to themselves. The only thing they can do is keep a password and stop children from using social media accounts," says the investigating officer, who observes that a number of children chat with strangers, making it difficult to keep track.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Vidya Reddy too expresses shock at sheer number of teenagers who chat with strangers online. The Tulir Director recounts horrific cases, including one where a 16-year-old girl was sexually assaulted and then blackmailed with videos of the abuse. The perpetrator allegedly threatened to leak the images if girl did not bring another child for him to rape.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While sexual grooming and other forms of online sexual abuse are common across the world, in India it takes a unique shape in South Asia. "Our society creates a repressive atmosphere, as far as engagement with the other gender is concerned. So, when the conversation is online, teenagers will risk their safety to push boundaries and the anonymity the internet provides has made this whole set up even more dangerous," concludes Vidya Reddy.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">*Name changed</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsminute-may-6-2017-a-13-year-olds-rape-in-tn-highlights-the-major-threat-online-sexual-grooming-poses-to-children'>https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/newsminute-may-6-2017-a-13-year-olds-rape-in-tn-highlights-the-major-threat-online-sexual-grooming-poses-to-children</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaSocial MediaInternet Governance2017-05-19T10:16:40ZNews Item