Safeguarding Liberty Against Mobilised Violence

The Bulandshahr incident of December 2018 bears all the hallmarks of mobilised violence: an undisguised political purpose, backing from well-organised groups, and a disregard for the lives of civilians and police personnel alike. In addition to the loss of life and property, such violence undermines a state of liberty in the country. For the violence is often directed against a diversity of opinions, be it on grounds of religion, language, eating habits, caste, or any of the other aspects of our lives that set us apart from each other and that form the basis for our richly plural society. The principle of liberty requires us to respect these differences and to let individuals determine for themselves the way they want to live. Mobilised violence strikes against this principle. It prevents individuals from expressing themselves in the present through brute force and creates a chilling effect that prevents more expression in the future for fear of reprisal. This erosion of liberty leaves our society poorer.Any intervention to alter this status quo will not be an easy one. The change that is most needed is an enlightened citizenry, one that respects the liberty of others. After all, every individual acting as part of a mob has a choice to not engage in violence. We must move towards a society where more individuals make the right decision when faced with this choice.Read more

Token Security or Tokenized Security

There is a need to protect the data belonging to individuals in these situations, providing the government with two possible policy options: it can choose to either overhaul the Aadhaar architecture completely, or it can build in additional security measures to ensure that individual data is not compromised.

Uninventing Aadhaar is not a practical proposal. It would have to include repealing the statute on Aadhaar, disbanding the database already created, and figuring out alternative means of delivering the services that are now dependent on Aadhaar. A more sustainable way forward is to better secure Aadhaar. This will involve not only the secure collection and storage of personal data but also a safe regulation of the manner in which third parties use it for authentication.

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What the GDPR Means for India

As the GDPR seeks to protect data users in Europe (and regions where the EU laws apply), it might not really make a difference to data users in India. However, this law extends to both citizens as well as non-citizens within the boundaries of the continent. So, if you have plans to travel to Europe, you have the added advantage of being covered by the protections under the GDPR as soon as you land there.On the other hand, the GDPR requires companies all over the world to comply with its provisions if they provide any goods or services anywhere in Europe, or in any manner monitor the behaviour of any individuals in Europe. This means that some Indian sectors such as information technology, the outsourcing industry, and pharmaceuticals might be hit by the GDPR. As the penalty for a contravention is up to 4% of the annual turnover of the company, this is not a trivial obligation for affected Indian data controllers.

However, the biggest impact of the GDPR for India is probably the indirect or the persuasive impact.

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The Unique Challenge of a Data Protection Law

We started this Brainstorm still reeling from the sweet rush of the Supreme Court decision declaring privacy as a fundamental right in India. This was followed by the encouraging news of an Expert Committee working on a new data protection law. Things seemed to be moving in the right direction: individuals would be vested with certain rights with respect to their data, and there would be certainty in terms of what data collectors could and could not do with this data. But the past few months have shown that this is no easy task.One of the objectives of any law is to legislate for the future: to ensure that the law is durable and stands the test of time. With data protection, we are witnessing a situation where our needs are in the present and there is no guarantee that they will remain the same in the future. We are grappling with defining the problems we face and brainstorming about possible solutions at the same time, with understandably mediocre results.Take the ongoing Aadhaar case in the Supreme Court and the recent revelations of the data harvesting from Facebook by Cambridge Analytica. There is an urgent need for clarity on both fronts, and yet, none is likely to be available anytime soon. These two cases reflect several of the challenges highlighted by our participants over the past few months of our discussion. They showcase the fragility of consent in the data-rich world of today. They show that the scope for data protection is vast and there are people from all walks of life who will be affected by it. They stress the need to equip individuals with rights to their data that they can understand and exercise. And enveloping all this is the realisation that any regulation of the field must not be dogmatic and rigid, but instead be in the form of an enabling institution that endures.Read more here.

The Devil in the Details

A week ago, the Justice Srikrishna Committee released a draft Personal Data Protection Bill and a Report to go with it. This is another step in the progress that has been made in the past year to create a data protection framework for India. It started with the Supreme Court judgement that recognised privacy as a fundamental right. This was followed by the constitution of the Justice Srikrishna Committee, the release of a White Paper, and public consultations on the recommendations made under it.The Bill and the Report, which had been expected for the better part of six months, have already attracted a flurry of critical commentary. While there are elements of these documents which are welcome, there are also serious concerns that require further attention.One of the positive aspects of the proposed law is its attention to detail. It is comprehensive and ticks most of the boxes that a data protection law ought to have. It vests individuals with certain rights with respect to their personal data, imposes obligations on entities that collect and process such data, and envisages a regulatory infrastructure that is supposed to facilitate the ecosystem within which data is collected, processed, and transferred. The Bill is also applicable to State entities, which is an upgrade over the status quo.Read more here.

Fix call drops and sluggish speed before you think of regulating internet

India’s regulators work in mysterious ways. Take the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which has suddenly decided that it wants to regulate internet services. As its name clearly suggests, TRAI’s job is to regulate the telecommunications industry. These are the companies that own and operate the “pipes”, like fiber-optic cables, towers, base stations, satellite transponders, undersea cables, switches, and networks. TRAI also regulates companies that provide some basic services that run on these “pipes”, namely telephony and the internet.Like its counterparts around the world, it does not, thankfully, regulate services that run on these “basic” services. That’s why you don’t need to apply for a license when you set up a website or launch an app.Looking at TRAI’s ‘Consultation Paper on Regulatory Framework for Over-the-Top (OTT) Communication Service’ that closed Monday, I’m left wondering just why would it want to introduce a digital licence-permit raj by asking whether “over the top” (OTT) services ought to be regulated, and if so, which ones and how.Read more

How to Regulate Internet Platforms Without Breaking Them

The biggest anticompetitive element of platforms is the violation of neutrality. When the platform, such as Amazon, also acts as a player on the very platform, it can lead to a conflict of interest. Once vertically integrated, the platform has an incentive to exclude competitors either directly by delisting competing vendors or indirectly through higher commission fees and manipulating the rankings.

Anticompetitive mergers and acquisitions of platforms also tend to go under the radar, as competition authorities normally make the decision to investigate cases according to a monetary threshold. However, the monetary value of a deal may not always highlight its anticompetitive effects. Stories of big technology firms acquiring small start-ups at bargain prices are quite common. The value of these start-ups could lie in the networks (user bases) or the data they possess. Thus, it would make sense for competition authorities to automatically review any deal that involves an exchange of certain forms (or a certain quantity) of data. If this principle had been in place, Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram would have come under greater scrutiny.

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India’s smartphone revolution is a phenomenon on the scale of Independence in 1947

Media headlines reporting research results often distort findings — substituting ‘newsworthiness’ for accuracy. The newsworthiness falls into two broad categories: “Whatever you thought you knew about this subject is completely wrong” or “research confirms what we knew to be right all along”. So, when a headline on BBC World this week announced that “a rising tide of nationalism in India is driving ordinary citizens to spread fake news”, we should wonder which of the two newsworthy categories it falls into.Unless you’ve been blissfully living under a rock somewhere without internet, the BBC’s principal claims aren’t too surprising: A lot of fake news that is circulated seeks to promote pride in national identity; Right-wing networks are better organised to push such narratives; and finally, there is “overlap of fake news sources on Twitter and support networks of Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.Now, your decision to believe and forward a particular tweet, image, or text message depends on four things: What you believe must be true (conditioning and bias); what you’ve said about it in the past (history); what others in your groups are saying (social proof); and what someone you respect says (authority). Your “fast brain” processes all of this in less than a second, and your fingers do the forwarding immediately after. You don’t look for evidence, you don’t look for counter-claims, and very often, you don’t even reflect on what you’ve read and forwarded. In fact, you don’t use the “slow brain” at all, because you’ve scrolled down and moved on to the next message. Don’t feel bad. You are not alone. Most of us are like that.Read more

The Answer is Blockchain

This is the third edition of The Jobscape, our fortnightly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. In this edition, Industry 4.0 holds a lot of hope for the future of jobs.Read more 

Empowerment and Fragility

Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, is an insightful analysis of the impact of social media on protests and social movements in today’s radically networked societies.

Most of the commentary about the role of social media in creating political communities either glorifies these media platforms (think Arab Spring) or vilifies them for their propensity to spread fake news and to create echo chambers (think Trump’s election campaign). Zeynep Tufecki’s book, Twitter and Tear Gas, however, provides a much-needed nuanced analysis on how digital platforms have altered the way in which a social movement’s dynamics play out. With the aim of understanding the challenges and strengths of digital activism, Tufecki tells a fascinating story of how social media empowers protests while simultaneously also exacerbating the fragilities of these movements.It is well known by now that the primary strength of networked public protests is the speed with which a large number of people and resources can be mobilised. This is because social media makes it easy to find people who share your political viewpoints even across geographical boundaries. What is not obvious, however, is that the speed and ease of participation also become a weakness of the networked movements. This is because ad hoc planning doesn’t allow for building capacities among protesters, which is needed to sustain a movement in the long-term. Often this results in the networked movements facing a tactical freeze in the face of changing circumstances.Read more here>

C is for Cyber

Susan Landau’s Listening In is an encyclopedia of cyber security, but misses out on the opportunity to set the stage for policy dialogue.

After the San Bernadino terrorist shootings of 2015, the FBI recovered an iPhone belonging to one of the attackers. FBI and Apple Inc came to loggerheads when Apple declined the FBI’s request to create software that would unlock the security protection on the iPhone. FBI wanted “exceptional access” to be built into the encryption systems on Apple’s iPhone, using the pretext of national security. However, Apple argued that in an age of cyber attacks, weakening of security should be the last thing to do, even if that means that the data of terrorists and criminals remain hidden from law enforcement. The basis of Apple’s argument was that security loopholes would be eventually found and exploited by hackers, presumably causing more harm to national security.Using the above case as the background for her book Listening In Cyber Security in an Insecure Age, Susan Landau, a cryptography and cybersecurity expert, studies the clash between the individual’s need for privacy and the law enforcement agencies’ need for access to information. Landau unequivocally bats for not weakening security standards, even if that makes government investigations difficult. She sets the stage for her argument for stronger encryption standards by narrating one example after another of cyber espionage, exploits and attacks, and how these have been getting more sophisticated over time. She traces the first cyber espionage to 1986. With the involvement of the CIA, KGB, and a student in Germany hacking into systems at an energy research lab at Berkeley, this story makes for a fascinating read.Read more here>

Modi govt must punish lynch mobs, not coerce WhatsApp into curbing users’ freedoms

WhatsApp is doing a lot of things in response to the union government: tagging forwarded messages as such, testing “a lower limit of five chats at once”, removing “the quick forward button next to media messages”, and promoting digital literacy. It also plans to introduce its “fake news verification model” in India ahead of the coming general elections in 2019. It has also announced a public competition to identify solutions on how to counter the spread of mala fide information.Yet, in the absence of any measures of its own to deter and punish violent lynch mobs, the government’s determination to move against one specific channel of communication could well end up as a wild goose chase.Conceptually, laying all the blame at WhatsApp’s door is a lot like blaming bus service operators for allowing criminals to ride to the scene of the crime. Not that the bus operator has no role to play in preventing the crime; but that it is not solely or primarily the bus operator’s fault that criminals ride their buses to work.Read more

Social Media Censorship Won’t Stop Lynchings. We Need a New Gandhi

That social media in general — and WhatsApp in particular — are important channels through which bigotry is spreading, is now well-known, if less well-understood.Around ten years ago, I had begun to speculate that as mobile internet pervades societies and they become radically networked, we will see both entirely new forms of politics and new forms of political expression.Read more

On Sale: Your Vote

Our data, taken without our consent, can be used for informational warfare that harms our democracy.

The Cambridge Analytica (CA) controversy has captured international mindspace over the last two days. In an interview with the Guardian, Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower at CA, laid bare the facts of how the company, under the influence of Steve Bannon (Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and former executive chairman of Breitbart) and Robert Mercer (an AI billionaire and Republican donor) used data from social media for “information warfare”. Wylie claims that over 50 million Facebook user profiles were harvested under false pretences, and then used for ballot box gains in the 2016 US presidential elections.People not only share and like things on social media, but often participate in “free” quizzes and personality tests that let these social media companies gather data on their personal and ideological preferences. The analysed data can  then used for commercial purposes, by either directly displaying ads and news tailored to particular demographic groups, or by further passing this data (knowingly or otherwise) to analytics companies like CA. The data analytics firms combine data from multiple sources and, using highly advanced algorithms, can generate sophisticated psychological profiles at group and individual levels. They can sell these to anyone who stands to profit from exploiting this data. These profiles are powerful tools, and can be used for tactical and strategic purposes against one’s opponent, or for spreading propaganda and fake news to influence  susceptible people. Thus ensues “information warfare”.Read more here>