Will India experience the fallout of Trump vs Twitter?

This is an extract from the full article which appeared in Deccan Herald.....But before resorting to isomorphic mimicry, it is important to understand what the executive order proposes. The reading suggests that it seeks to narrow the definition of 'good faith' under which a platform can carry out 'Good Samaritan' blocking. Kate Klonick was quoted in Recode as saying that the order was not enforceable and even referred to it is as 'political theatre'. And Daphne Keller published an annotated version of the order in which she classified various sections as 'atmospherics', 'legally dubious', and points on which 'reasonable minds can differ.The current trajectory in India appears to be headed in the opposite direction. A recent PIL in the Supreme Court, filed by a BJP member sought to make it mandatory to link social media accounts with identification. While the petition itself was disposed of, the petitioner was directed to be impleaded in the ongoing Whatsapp Traceability case. The draft Personal Data Protections proposes 'voluntary' verification for social media intermediaries.

#BanTikTok Solves Nothing

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.Earlier this month, there was a huge push on Twitter to #BanTikTok. While Twitter is always enraged about most things, there are few apps in India that divide opinion more than TikTok. Earlier last year, Madras High Court placed a ban on the app, only to lift it later.Let us go a level deeper than the Twitter outrage and look at the reasons behind the call to ban the app. When the Madras High Court gave the order to ban TikTok, there was a clear implicit rationale that can broadly be divided into three main points. Firstly, TikTok has problems with content. Media coverage in India and abroad have noted the presence of pornography on the platform. Besides, the platform is a very graphic medium to spread hate speech. WIRED has done some excellent reporting on this and finds that the app has been used as a channel to incite violence between castes, at times leading to murder. 

What 300 Days of Internet Winter in Kashmir Tell Us About Erecting a Digital Wall

This is an extract from the full article published on The Wire.....What is the cost of this protracted disruption?There is no shortage of real-life stories about the economic impact this prolonged Internet disruption has had in the union territory. Media reports are replete with such examples.Given that we are still in the midst of these events, an academic exercise to estimate the economic costs has not been published.Still, using available numbers regarding internet subscribers (38% from TRAI for the service area of Jammu and Kashmir) and a rough estimate of time connected drawn out from reports on patterns of internet usage by people in India (different sources peg the ‘active consumption’ time between 90 minutes and 150 minutes. Let’s use the higher end of that range. Note that there is no measure of passive consumption impacted), it is possible to arrive at a back-of-the-envelope ‘estimate’ of how many hours of Internet access have potentially been disrupted since August 4, 2019.

Between August 4 and January 14, when there was a complete shutdown, this number amounted to ~1.9 billion hours. In the period from January 14 to March 4, when there was whitelisted access another ~600 million hours were added. And the 87 days between then and May 30, will have accounted for another ~1 billion hours. That adds up to around 3.5 billion hours of disrupted internet access for approximately 12.25 million people. Let that sink in.

Advertising a tax on the poor, pandemic going to exacerbate it

Supply of endless addictive content is a feature and a bug of the attention economy. However, much like its traditional counterpart, the attention economy is harsher on the poor than on the rich. And the pandemic is likely going to make it worse. Your attention has a monetary value for streaming platforms. Given by the current monthly prices, Netflix values your time at ₹26.2/day, Prime Video at ₹4.2/day, Hotstar at ₹9.8 a day, and YouTube (Premium) at ₹4.2/day. Roughly the per capita income of an Indian is ₹1,35,048. A yearly subscription to Netflix would cost 7.1% of that figure; Prime Video would be 1.1%, Hotstar at 2.65%, and YouTube at 1.14%.Read more.

Why India needs to be the centre for content moderation reform

You could put a price tag on what it costs to keep platforms clean of harmful content. $52 million is a good starting point (and an underestimation). But the learnings that come out of this experience have the potential to be priceless. Not just in terms of how much money they can potentially save in counselling costs, but in terms of preventing the mental harm that content moderation causes people who undertake it.The article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Read more. 

Will Facebook’s ‘Supreme Court’ make the internet a safer place?

An intended and anticipated consequence of this board is that it will instil more transparency into the process of what stays up and why. By reporting on what the board discussed and did not discuss, it will help bring more clarity around the most prevalent problems on the platform. It may help tell us whether bullying is a bigger problem than hate speech or how (or where) harassment and racism manifest themselves. Read more. This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.

Why govt must address the question of access inequity before making mobile apps mandatory during COVID-19

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The Issues

Several concerns have been raised about the implications on multiple fronts. Privacy, and the risk of its evolution into a vehicle for mass surveillance. Security, and the potential information security risks to individual users as well as a large centralised database of citizen data. Legal - whether the National Disaster Management Act confers the necessary powers to do so, as well as the absence of Data Protection legislation. Technological - efficacy of contact tracing apps/algorithmic risk detection and the associated issues with false positives and false negatives. Transparency - opaque processes and the fact that the code has not been open-source yet. Some reports suggest that this may happen when the app is considered to be 'stable'. It is unclear, though, how stability is defined.The Ada Lovelace Institute has published a rapid review titled "Exit through the App Store" which warns of the risks of 'rushed deployment of technological solutions without credible supporting evidence and independent oversight'.

On Equity

An aspect which is under explored is Equity, or the lack of it. In designing public policy, Equity is a crucial part of policy design. It deals with the social allocation of benefits and deals with the questions of 'who pays' and 'who benefits'. In the book 'Policy Paradox', Deborah Stone lists 3 dimensions and 8 issues and associated dilemmas with each distribution method. Ultimately, this is a complex undertaking and no matter what criteria is for distribution, some group or the other will feel that they have been left-behind by the policy.Read more

Jio-Facebook’s e-commerce monopoly is not a foregone conclusion

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle, views are personal.Earlier last month when Facebook made a $5.7 billion, (₹43,574 crore) investment to buy 9.99% share in Jio Platforms ltd, it led to plenty of analysis on how this deal was going to impact the Indian digital ecosystem.There is, of course, plenty to read into. For starters, you could say that for Facebook, this is all a long ploy to monetize WhatsApp. WhatsApp is the dominant means of communication in India. In 2017, Indians made 50 million minutes of WhatsApp video calls a day.Considering the bigger picture, Indian traffic on WhatsApp is bound to be significantly higher. WhatsApp has likely acquired a sizeable number of Indian customers since 2017 and the statistic above does not even take into account time spent by Indians on voice calls and texts.India is a huge market opportunity for WhatsApp, and considering the platform is end to end encrypted and does not run ads, the market dominance does not directly translate into revenue. It is no wonder that WhatsApp has been trying to launch a payments service in India for over two years now. ‘WhatsApp Pay’ has recently been granted regulatory approval to roll out the service in a phased manner.  Chatter after the deal focused on the combination of WhatsApp and ‘JioMart’ bringing kirana stores online, making a decisive entry into a new, relatively unexplored landscape.When asked to do a ‘TalkPoint’ by The Print on the subject, I found to my surprise, the widespread speculation around whether this news was the beginning of an inevitable monopoly. The short answer to this question is that the Jio-Facebook alliance translating into a monopoly is far from a foregone conclusion.The long answer begins with my information economics class for The Takshashila Institution. During the segment on standards wars, one of the key topics is around what are the key assets for a technology to establish itself as a standard. According to Hal Varian (Chief Economist at Google), there are seven key assets to a standards war; control over an installed base of users, intellectual property rights, ability to innovate, first-mover advantages, manufacturing abilities, strength in complements, brand name and reputation.Just looking at the deal and the nature of JioMart and WhatsApp, it is evident that the alliance has the first mover advantage. Kirana stores are an unexplored market and there is a significant opportunity to be tapped here. But a first mover advantage does not directly translate into victory.History of modern tech (a fascinating topic for a different column) has repeatedly taught us that doing something right can be more important than doing something first. The iPad was not the first tablet and Microsoft Zune was launched before the iTouch. But Zune, and the early competitors to the iPad have been relegated to being case studies in product failure.Put this into context, and the rest of recent news starts to seem like a natural flow of events. The week the news broke, Amazon’s homepage was updated with an article by Gopal Pillai (VP, Seller Services) titled ‘Local Shops on Amazon, a new beginning for offline retailers, highlighting Amazon’s shift of focus towards the issue. The timing is not a coincidence, competition moves fast. In the coming months, expect similar developments from Flipkart and Snapdeal as well.It is also important to note that core competences are going to play an important role here. Jio and Facebook can boast unparalleled national integration and scale.  However, neither of those companies have the experience in seller interactions, operating complex supply chains, and consumer preference data that Amazon boasts.So the first mover advantage is not definitive. Comparative strengths in other assets will be established over time. It is too early to say who the players will be. There is a whole bunch of plausible combinations involving payment apps, telcos, and e-commerce giants that could be possible. The Jio-Facebook alliance is likely the first alliance in a battle that is going to be long and drawn out. In addition, we do not know yet how the ability to innovate and strength in complements will demonstrate itself over the coming times.Borrowing from Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. The outcome of this deal on the e-commerce landscape in India is filled with known unknowns.Sure, given Facebook’s financial might and Jio’s demonstrated understanding of the Indian market, it is so easy to classify the move as the beginning of a monopoly. It may well turn out to be one. But to conclude that a monopoly is inevitable or that in some sense we are already there, is jumping to conclusions.

Stay safe and go back to the newspaper this pandemic

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.It is arguably easier to deal with the coronavirus than it is to deal with misinformation about it. The key difference is that when dealing with the former, you have your work cut out for you. Maintain social distancing, close borders, flatten the curve, and build capacity in the national healthcare system. When it comes to dealing with misinformation there is no one set of steps you can take to definitively win the battle.We did not need a global pandemic to realise how big a challenge misinformation is, but it helps. In India and abroad, we have seen some spectacular consequences of spreading misinformation. In the UK and Netherlands, conspiracy theorists spread misinformation claiming that 5G cell towers were spreading coronavirus. As a result of which, some 50 towers were burnt in the UK and 16 in the Netherlands.

 Closer to home, when PM Modi asked citizens to light candles and make noise for 10 minutes, WhatsApp was rife with networks of misinformation. People claimed that the rise in temperatures or the chance in decibel levels would kill the virus. Even if you have not been subject to any of these messages, you have likely heard that Indore locals or Muslim mobs attacked health staff and attacked doctors who went to treat them.  To put it mildly, it does not make any sense to attack doctors during a pandemic. Until you read Indian Express’ report that fake WhatsApp videos were circulated in localities claiming that healthy Muslims are being taken away and injected with the virus were doing the rounds of Tatpatti Bakhal and adjoining localities.Misinformation is so potent because social media is an excellent tool to spread narratives and reinforce beliefs, as opposed to television. Imagine a scenario when you are viewing protests live through news on a television screen. In all likelihood, all you can see is a hoard of people fighting with the police or marching down an aisle with slogans printed on charts.  The information you take in is largely what is visible on the charts or what the anchor at the time is saying.Compare that to how you observe a protest on social media. On Twitter, when you follow a trending hashtag, it will show you the video of the protestors or the slogans they carry. In addition, you will also be able to look at what most people are saying or thinking about during the protests. This helps absorb a narrative a lot more quickly than a news anchor would.In times of panic, like protests or a pandemic, the narratives thrive and get a larger audience. This leads to more engagement and more content. It is a vicious cycle that reinforces itself. That’s how it becomes easy to believe that 5G towers are spreading the virus or that doctors have come to inject you with the virus and not to treat you.It’s hard to say whether most misinformation is a result of malice or stupidity. But when it comes to tackling the infodemic, there are not a lot of generally accepted truths in the area.  The broad goal is clear. We need to re-evaluate the importance we afford to social media in our news diet. To anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, it is evident that WhatsApp is not a credible source of information.In that spirit, it is easy to go to news sources that are free and convenient to access, such as Twitter and Facebook. It is even better when the news comes to you through push notifications on WhatsApp. However, when we rely on these sources for the news, there is no assurance that we actually get the news.Quality journalism and information that comes as a result of it is a commodity. Like most commodities, it might make sense to pay for it with money (not with privacy). Paying for the news is inherently not a foreign concept. We have paid for newspapers before, and a significant number of us still do so. It may not make sense to physically hold a newspaper everyday right now, but paid digital access is a more convenient and ironically, a more natural alternative.The trade-off is worth it. There is no end in sight to the lockdown and the pandemic. In times such as these, the value we attribute to information will increase on average. You may have a gripe with the editor about the stories s/he curates for you, but in a good news agency, there is genuine effort involved in fact checking and ensuring that consumers get both sides of a story. Any person who sends you a forward on WhatsApp will not go through any of these pains.So this lockdown, consider paying for the news or be critical of what you consume for free.As 5G towers in the UK and injured doctors in Indore will tell you, it is worth it. 

Should You Download Aarogya Setu?

This week of the pandemic has focused significantly on around Aarogya Setu and contact tracing. So much so that during his speech extending the lockdown, PM Modi urged people to download the app.The idea is for the Government to use the app to know where you are and who you have been in contact with, enabling contact tracing.The app’s privacy policy has been under fire since its release and has been updated recently with improved protections. Because the app is to be used for contact tracing as well as quarantine enforcement, it will collect huge amounts of personal and sensitive data. For instance, signing up to the app requires you to put in your name, age, gender, phone number, and profession.Once you have registered, the app will begin to use Bluetooth to check who you have been in contact with. In case you test positive, the information might come in handy to notify people who may have also been infected. However, the Bluetooth itself does not give away your location.The way it works is if the Bluetooth on your phone detects another phone in range, the pair will exchange keys and keep a record of the interaction.The app will use the GPS inbuilt on your phone to monitor your location, enabling it to determine whether you are adhering to the quarantine with significant accuracy. The phone will take note of your location every 15 minutes and only share the information with the Government server if you test positive.Normally, you would have found the data collected by the app to be extremely invasive. But then again, these are not normal times. You could make the argument that the measures are necessary and proportional.There are some technical shortcomings and slightly concerning macro trends with the concept. Firstly, the usage of Bluetooth. Bluetooth is fairly trustworthy over 6 ft (the norm for physical distancing). However, the same things that stop coronavirus from spreading do not apply to Bluetooth. As put by Casey Newton, Bluetooth can recognise two devices kept 10 ft and an apartment wall apart while the coronavirus may not transmit through walls.Situations like these are likely to lead to a lot of false positives.  Secondly, the context here matters. India faces different challenges as compared to the developed world. Earlier this month, when Apple and Google came up with the idea to enable contact tracing, it led to plenty of debate around wealth distribution being strongly correlated with OS distribution.The idea is that if you wanted to check where in the world wealth was concentrated, you could look at a map of iOS users around the world. Android, on the other hand, runs on a lot more smartphones than iOS, and not all of them have Bluetooth-LE, which is needed to enable contact tracing. Here, it is the poor who lose out.In India’s case, the poor currently lose out because they own feature phones and not smartphones. While Medianama reports that the Government is working on a feature phone version of the app, the poor will continue to remain at a disadvantage until it is released.Should you download the app? Yes. The updated privacy policy is a marked improvement upon the previous one. Most data collected by the app is stored on the device locally or 30 days, after which it is deleted. Data that is shared with the Government will be deleted after 45 days.However, in case you are unfortunate enough to test positive, the information shared with the Government will be deleted two months after the individual is cured.Broadly speaking, this policy is a step towards better data management practices. While protections could have been made better through open sourcing the app and disclosing the encryption, the current version of the app is reasonable in its approach and mandate.  More importantly, perhaps, in last week’s column, I made the point that the liberties we give up today may end up becoming the norm tomorrow.This very much applies to Aarogya Setu. Even with an updated privacy policy, in regular times, the app would have been considered invasive to personal privacy.The hallmark of a good policy/programme is that it ceases to exist once it has achieved its goal. What the app does need is an end date so that it does not inadvertently set a new normal. This also applies to measures such as facial recognition techniques being used to enforce quarantines as well as any other means that collect, store or process data.The pandemic will hopefully come to an end sometime. Keeping that in mind, so should the technology measures that are used to contain it. In that regard, Aarogya Setu should lead the way. A new, worse normal in privacy is the last thing the world needs. This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.

Overcorrection at the cost of privacy during coronavirus is problematic

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal. There are three pillars of crisis management, according to NYU professor Scott Galloway. First, the top guy/girl takes responsibility. Second, acknowledging the issue. Third, overcorrect. When you read it out loud, it seems reasonably straightforward but is a process that should not be taken for granted.It has taken governments and leaders around the world multiple attempts to take responsibility and acknowledge the issue. Finally, time has come to overcorrect. Six months from now when things are back to relatively normal, measures taken now may look drastic, but that is the point.However, it is not going to be easy to overcorrect. Even governments have to follow social distancing and may already have limited capacity to deal with a pandemic of this size. Given the pervasive nature of modern technology, it is no wonder that government administrations around the world are going to try and use digital methods to aid their efforts.China has been ahead of the curve on this. The government has begun using the Alipay app to assign citizens with QR codes based on their risk of exposure to regulate citizen movement. A green QR code means that you are free to move around. A yellow code means a one week quarantine while a red QR code refers to a two week quarantine. In Tamil Nadu, the Police is now using facial recognition to track people in quarantine. At a larger scale, the Union Government of India is using the Aarogya Setu app to help connect Indian citizens to health services.To most people, it might not make sense to talk about privacy in such times. And on one level, they would be right. It is hard to overstate the seriousness of the situation and dealing with the pandemic comes first. In such emergencies, concerns about privacy come second. Moreover, as a fundamental right in India, privacy exists with reasonable restrictions. Erosions of privacy must be necessary, legal, and proportional. Instead of being suspended, this standard should be upheld. Because as the Union Government (and the larger international community) use facial recognition, or apps such as the one deployed in China, it is crucial to keep in mind that such techniques have the potential to set a new normal by resetting our expectations on personal privacy.Rahul Matthan has an excellent analysis backed by observations regarding this. Before 26/11, hotels in India would let you drive to the entrance and hand over your keys to the valet. Post the Mumbai attacks, vehicles are mandatorily screened, as are people and the contents of their baggage. As a practice, it seemed important and urgent at the time, and has now become routine.More than a decade from now, doing so has become the expectation, and it is probably for the best. However, that was 2008, and the difference between now and then is that the liberties yielded today will be a lot more invasive than just vehicle checking at hotels.For instance, in case of CoBuddy (the app bring used in Tamil Nadu to track people), the app has constant access to the phone’s GPS and continuously checks the location of the phone. The app automatically sends an alert to the Police as soon as the person moves out of the geofence. The Police also sends users prompts 2-3 times a day to verify their faces.Not all data is created equal. While both facial data and location data are personal and sensitive, the former tends to be more invasive. This is because facial information is permanent and cannot be easily changed. While constant access to people’s location can help determine where they live and their movement patterns, it is easier to change where you go compared to how you look.The Aarogya Setu app, while admittedly better than (now discontinued) Corona Cavach when it comes to privacy, still collects your name, phone number, age, sex, profession, countries visited in the last 30 days and whether or not you are a smoker (apart from constant access to your location). Compare this with the Singapore government’s app, Trace Together, that only stores your mobile number and a randomly generated ID. Not only are we being subject to invasive apps, lists of infected people with their names and addresses have been made publicly available without their consent.Given the nature of the crisis and the tech response we have seen, it is evident that two things are happening here. Firstly, there is little regard to data minimization. Governments in India and across the world are collecting more data and accessing increased data points to get a better sense of people’s movements during the crisis. Once your name, age, facial data is shared with the government, it is unlikely to change. Instead, once this crisis is over, the data can be used for purposes it wasn’t collected for.Secondly, violations of personal privacy are becoming the norm and not the exception. It is now somehow okay to post lists of infected people on WhatsApp groups and to provide facial data to the police 2-3 times a day. Much like the vehicle checks at hotels post the 26/11 attacks, our expectations of privacy are being reset. Only this time, it is being done at scale.It is fair to say that we live in unprecedented times. But just because we do, does not mean that the necessity and proportionality standards for eroding personal privacy should be suspended. If anything, they should instead be upheld. Because the liberties we give up today, may end up becoming the norm tomorrow.

Zoom fiasco highlights need for data protection law

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle.None of the protections afforded by a privacy law are in place yet, which leaves our data open to exploitation by tech companies.There has been a lot going on at Zoom. The video conference app has been a major beneficiary from the lockdowns imposed due to the coronavirus, as humanity participates in its largest-ever work from home experiment. As a result, Zoom’s shares have doubled in value in less than six months. All is not well though, the company has been fraught with privacy issues recently. For instance, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) pointed out that hosts of Zoom meetings can see if the participants are paying attention based on whether or not the Zoom window is active on their screens.Zoom would likely make the argument that the ability to be able to check whether people are active on a team call is a feature, not an instrument meant to cause harm. Which is one way to look at things. But at the same time, that is not the only slip up in terms of privacy the company has been embroiled in this past month. VICE reported that Zoom’s iOS app sends user data to Facebook even if you do not have a Facebook account. Zoom notifies Facebook when the user opens the app, shares details about the user’s device, such as the model, time zone, city, phone carrier, and the unique advertiser identifier (a unique number created by user devices which are then used to target ads).Zoom’s privacy policy is not explicit about this data collection and there is a blame game to be played here. Facebook can make the argument that it requires developers (like Zoom) using Facebook’s SDKs and Pixels to be transparent about the data they are collecting, using and sharing. Zoom can and has argued that Facebook was collecting unnecessary device data. We need to talk about all of this because apps like Zoom and Houseparty are not going anywhere.Instead, this incident is an excellent teacher for how policy and protections work in the data protection space. Firstly, it highlights the need and urgency for India (and other countries) to have a data protection law. These are exactly the kind of offenses a data protection law is supposed to penalise. In an ideal world, had there been a data protection law in place here, Zoom likely would have had to adhere to a standard of explicit consent. This way, the user would have been aware of what data was being shared. Had Zoom not adhered to the guidelines of consent, it would have had to pay a penalty. The data being shared with Facebook would have come under ambits of personal data, personal sensitive data and non-personal data, requiring different levels of protection and liability.The fact that none of the protections afforded by a privacy law are in place yet means the only protections users have are those given to them by companies whose objective is to maximise shareholder value. More often than not maximising shareholder value comes at a cost of trampling on user rights. Most companies will be more than happy to make this trade-off and would ideally want to do it when there isn’t a data protection law in place.At this point, it is hard to state whether or not a data protection regulation is going to be a definitive solution to incidents like these. Broadly because there isn’t a lot of precedence to learn from yet. Arguably the most significant existing legislation in this space is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU. The law was enforced in May 2018 and an assessment of how its implementation has fared is due by the Commission sometime this year.There is every chance that the Personal Data Protection regulation that India ends up adopting is not going to fix everything when it comes to abuses of power that come with a vacuum in the data protection space. It is going to be hard to implement clauses and penalties on every website on the internet and to track data flow at scale.  However, as any policy analyst worth their salt will tell you, change happens at the margins.In the larger picture, Zoom sharing data with Facebook without explicit notice is a sign that is reflective of a deeper problem of accountability within the data protection space. There are no laws, and when laws do exist, they are near impossible to impose and monitor. This should serve as a high-profile warning sign of practices that currently exist and are going to continue until regulation exists.The writer is a technology policy analyst at The Takshashila Institution. Views are personal.

As Chorus of 'Chinese Virus' Rings Loudly in India, Is the Stage Set For an Info-Ops Tussle?

This article was originally published on The WireUsers of Indian Twitter, for want of a better term, will not have been able to escape the term ‘Chinese virus’ trending on the platform in the form of different hashtags over the last 10 days.What seemingly started off as agitprop by the American right has transcended boundaries and resonated in India as well, echoing sentiment that Beijing and the Chinese should be severely penalised for the COVID-19 pandemic.This sentiment was backed by what appeared to be some coordinated activity on Twitter from March 24 onward, around the time of India’s lockdown, all with the purpose of taking aim at China.#ChineseVirus19, #ChineseBioterrorisn, #Chinaliedpeopledied and #ChineseVirusCorona were some of the hashtags being used in favour of this narrative around March 24 and March 25.Read more

What Zoom’s rise tells us about future of work culture

This article was first published in Deccan Herald.The shift to working from home would have happened in an organic manner, but the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the speed of change; important to think about the precautions we must take to make this on-going experiment successfulThe coronavirus pandemic has become the reason for the largest work from home experiment in history. This phenomenon has meant an increased use of video conferencing and collaboration platforms that allow many people to simultaneously interact and collaborate in a virtual setting.Not surprisingly, the company that has benefited most from this on-going experiment is Zoom, a video conferencing platform that is being used by millions of users. Zoom’s share price has more than doubled since the new coronavirus began to spread in December 2019. There has also been a rise in trolling and graphic content on Zoom, an almost definitive sign that it is rising in popularity among teenagers and not just working professionals.Zoom’s rise (along with other video conferencing platforms like Skype and Slack) is indicative of a broader shift in the work culture. This shift to working from home or working remotely would have likely happened in an organic manner anyway, but the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated its speed.There isn’t much value in arguing about whether this phase will lead to a permanent shift in terms of a bulk of jobs being performed remotely from now. That question depends on too many variables, and it is impossible to predict.But the shift itself needs to be understood as part of an evolving trend. Workspaces for the most part have moved from cubicles to open-plan offices. As Chris Bailey notes in Hyperfocus, it is contentious to conclude that open-plan offices improved productivity across the board. What open-plan offices did was to make employees think twice before interrupting their colleagues, and made them more respectful of each other’s time.The future of the office space, moving on from open-plan offices, is the virtual office (widely anticipated and now catalysed by the COVID-19 threat), with people logging in and conducting meetings from home. This brings us to what the characteristics of this new work from home culture will be and what broad precautions we must take to ensure that remote working is successful for us as a people.Thinking through the idea of working remotelyThe first and most important thing to look out for here is going to be the impact this is going to have on the attention economy. With an increasing number of people working from home today, there is going to be a significant reduction in friction. Let me explain, the attention economy runs on the idea of manipulating people to spend more time on platforms. Companies do this by eliminating friction between the user and the content This is why the feed on Instagram is endless, or why the default option on Netflix is to keep watching more instead of stopping. Because everything is either free or so easy to access, attention becomes the currency.But when in office environments, for example, during a meeting, there is a certain amount of friction in accessing these apps. Using Instagram while talking to a colleague is going to have a social cost on your relationship. However, when working from home, it is going to be significantly easier for employees to give in to their distractions instead of focusing on tasks at hand. It is no wonder that Zoom has begun offering a feature that allows hosts to check if participants are paying attention based on whether or not the Zoom window is active on their screens.In addition, this also opens a can of worms for privacy breaches and the issue of regulating non-personal data. Because a huge number of people are shifting to working online for the foreseeable future, the value of online meetings increases in terms of the data being shared on them. This gives video conferencing and collaboration platforms the incentive to collect and share an increased amount of data with advertisers. For example, information on when users open the app, details about the user’s device – such as the model, time zone, city, phone carrier, and the unique advertiser identifier (a unique number created by user devices which are then used to target ads).In addition, increased workloads being transferred online will also generate increasing volumes of non-personal data, making the debate on how that should be regulated more relevant. For context, non-personal data is a negative term that is used to refer to all data that is not personal. This includes data like company financials, growth projections, and quite possibly most things discussed in office meetings.It is unlikely that COVID-19 has transformed offices forever. In this regard, its role in history is likely to be seen as a catalyst, accelerating the shift from offline offices to online offices. But as it does so, we need to take precautions by introducing friction in the attention economy, being conscious of the privacy trade-offs being made to facilitate new features, and installing regulation for the governance of non-personal data.(Rohan Seth is a technology policy analyst at The Takshashila Institution)

Saving Our Own: COVID-19 Presents Challenges and Opportunities in Technology

With the pandemic existing at this scale, state capacity alone may not be enough to respond effectively. Struggling in the face of an invisible threat, states have to co-opt technology to augment their arsenal for a long-haul fight against coronavirus.The unprecedented spread of the COVID-19 outbreak is overwhelming healthcare systems across the world. In less than three months, the virus has impacted 177 countries or territories (including cruise ships) infecting over 2,30,000 people and killing over 11,000. The rapidity of community spread has left policymakers and bureaucrats scrambling for ways to bolster an overworked healthcare system. Another impending concern is of people who are struggling to adjust to a self-isolation way of life.With the pandemic existing at this scale, state capacity alone may not be enough to respond effectively. Struggling in the face of an invisible threat, states have to co-opt technology to augment their arsenal for a long-haul fight against coronavirus.There are three phases in which technology can be effective - one in the detection of COVID-19 positive individuals; second in enforcing quarantine conditions and finally on facilitating the non-infected individuals to stay-at-home.Technological developments of the last few decades are helping the testing regime that has been currently applied for COVID-19. There are two stages for detection: thermal screening that we see at airports or public places and the confirmatory test. The thermal screening is a crude process - it can only identify if someone has a fever. While the confirmatory test usually determines if the virus is present in the sample by searching for the virus’s RNA.However, this depends on an adequate amount of virus being present in the sample which further depends on the way the sample was taken. An alternative way to test for COVID-19 is to identify antibodies that the human body makes in response to the virus. This is a better method because antibodies can stay in the body long after the infection is over and therefore can be used to determine a history of infection.The first serological tests based on antibody testing are now being made available. These tests will make identifying susceptible people easier and hopefully reduce the ambiguity brought on by the other methods.Quarantine and self-isolation seem to be a difficult way to contain viruses, even celebrities have chosen to defy quarantine, setting bad examples for the general public. China, one of the world’s most technologically advanced societies, was quick to adopt self-isolation and asked its residents to stay indoors.Through AliPay (one of the most popular mobile apps in China), the Chinese State has attempted to regulate the movement of its people. The idea is that based on a number of factors, each person’s app is going to be assigned a QR code to signify a risk of exposure. The code itself has three categories; green - unrestricted movement, yellow- self-quarantine for a week, and red - self-quarantine for two weeks. The system is being rolled out nationwide and is going to make it extremely hard for people to go around town without having a code.There are concerns with these measures, such as privacy violations (though some of the data being collected is not permanent in nature, for instance, location data). But it has unintended but anticipated consequences. In China, people were not informed about what variables their QR codes were being calculated. So people who were returning home from work and had their codes turn red were not allowed entry in their apartment complexes and were exposed to a higher degree of risk. Or for people departing high-risk areas having their codes turn red meant they could not get on flights or take exits on highways. Yet effective quarantine measures are required and the compromise on privacy may be essential to ensure wider public health. In India particularly, this appears to have been brought on by public behaviour itself endangering public health should be a crime, and safeguards against such lapses should not be undermined.Finally, technological innovations need to help individuals working from home maintaining social contacts. There hasn’t been a lot of discussion around how extended periods of isolation could impact mental health. With longer work-from-home durations and quarantine, there is a significant chance that we might be looking at increased cases of depression. Communities being isolated at this level is unprecedented, and if the situation continues like this for a longer period, people will miss physical contact, social validation, and also the endorphins from a gym session. This is a gap that tech can and may need to address if things continue the way they are.Given the anticipated long-term effects of this viral outbreak, we are going to need technological interventions to curb it as soon as possible and help us adjust to a new way of life in the long term.Shambhavi Naik is a research fellow at the Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru. Rohan Seth is a policy analyst at the Takshashila Institution, Bengaluru. Views are personal.This article was first published in News 18.

Antitrust is already working. Here’s why.

With the United States Congress taking aim at Google’s Search in anti-trust hearings, anti-trust is in the spotlight again. It is still unclear whether tech platforms privileging their products is enough to build and win an anti-trust case against big tech. We will find the answer to that question in the times to come. Until then, let us remember that 2019 displayed two memorable sides of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. The first where he made the US Congress look stupid while explaining to them how Facebook made money. Remember, “Senator, we run ads”. The other side was visible when he talked about Elizabeth Warren being an existential threat to Facebook.Warren had not been the favorite to win the Democratic ticket for a while, let alone the Presidency, but was big enough to get herself heard. And a big part of her message was opposition to Big Tech and her call to break up Amazon, Google, and Facebook. Even if Warren goes on to win the Presidency (she has dropped out of the race now) and launches her anti-Big Tech campaign, it is unlikely that any of the Big Four (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google) would be broken up so easily.Actually, there are a bunch of reasons why it is unlikely that Big Tech would be broken anytime soon. For starters, all of them have the capital and expertise at hand to handle an anti-trust challenge. Also, you could well argue that anti-trust (or at least the way it operates) wasn’t built for this. And finally, a significant part of America views these companies as symbols of success, and at times engines of economic growth.So how is anti-trust working? Is it because it seems to have successfully threatened Facebook to merge its messaging services, making it harder to separate them? No. Anti-trust would still apply to a more interoperable messenger. If it could break up AT&T, one of the largest and most complex networks known to mankind, then consider it capable enough to mandate the decoupling of a complex messaging service.Instead, anti-trust works today as a deterrent, and a fairly effective one at that. Through the threat of breaking up Big Tech, it has ensured that these massive corporations think thrice before acquiring smaller firms. Instead, it has unknowingly been responsible for establishing a new approach to dealing with competition in Silicon Valley: The slow burn.The idea is that bigger tech companies slowly eat into their competitor’s market share or refrain from entering into new markets for fear of anti-trust. Professor Scott Galloway explains this well through Star Wars. Here is a slightly paraphrased version of his analysis:The Death Star’s multiple reactors can cause the total and rapid destruction of a planet. But, firing a single reactor on a planet is enough to be overkill for a city or a base, but nowhere near enough power to destroy an entire planet. That is basically what Big Tech has also adopted as a strategy.Prime Microsoft (1990s) was absolutely ruthless as a company. During the first browser wars, it killed its closest competitor, Netscape, and ended up inviting anti-trust. Since then, Microsoft has learned. Now, for instance, it has decided to compete against Slack with its latest offering, Teams. Turn on the single reactor. Microsoft began by offering Teams at a marginally lower price point than Slack. It has gradually upped the ante since then. Now bundling Teams with the Office 365 bundle, it has passed Slack in terms of users (13 million v 10 million, according to the most recent reports). Had Microsoft wanted to turn on the death star, it could have begun with retailing Teams for free and added in support for the G-Suite and say, Zoom. Making Teams interoperable would have taken away much of Slack’s USP.Once you begin thinking in terms of this analogy, a lot of Big Tech’s actions (and non-actions) begin to make sense. Think Amazon and FedEx.Amazon sits upon arguably the world’s best physical distribution networks. With some significant tweaking, they can also perform FedEx’s functions of transporting packages between cities. This would easily eat into the market share of FedEx. Plus, since it is Amazon, it is likely that replacing FedEx would happen at break-even or loss, beating FedEx’s price point. Amazon somewhat turned on the single death ray recently when it blocked its sellers from using FedEx ground for Prime shipments during the holiday season,  citing a dip in performance levels. Had it chosen to turn on the Death Star, it could have banned their express service from Prime Shipments and both express and ground services on Non-Prime Shipments.Amazon has also perfected its software over the years. So, when you order something on the platform, it feels frictionless. When was the last time you used the FedEx app? For Amazon, this market is low-hanging fruit – One that it won’t go for (at least with all its push) in the foreseeable future.And that in itself is how anti-trust is working. Yes, it wasn’t built keeping in mind Big Tech. Who could have predicted that we would have such companies back then? Big Tech likely has the capacity and expertise to navigate an anti-trust challenge. Anti-trust may not have been built for this, but the current version of it seems to have unintentionally been repurposed. It is now akin to a tool of deterrence against Big Tech. To some extent, we may have Warren to thank for it.Rohan Seth is a Policy Analyst at the Takshashila Institution. Views are personal.This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. 

SC Verdict: A positive step to realise VC's potential

On March 4, a historic day for the cryptocurrency industry in India, the Supreme Court of India quashed the Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) prohibition on the trade of virtual currency (VC). The road towards the day of the verdict has been long and arduous. Even this verdict is a small win and how the cryptocurrency industry moves ahead remains to be seen. The Supreme Court concluded that the interdiction of VCs failed the four-pronged proportionality test and violated the fundamental right of the cryptocurrency exchanges to carry out any occupation, trade, or business. The Court believed that there were less intrusive measures to achieve the purposes that RBI intended. It also added that the RBI had not presented any empirical evidence to show that entities regulated by it suffered harm due to VC exchanges.

Nevertheless, the Court refuted almost all other arguments made by the petitioners. It upheld the right of the RBI to regulate VCs and commented that the RBI could regulate/prohibit anything that may impact the financial system of the country. On the claim by the petitioners that the circular was an executive action by the RBI and did not afford similar judicial acceptance as legislative action, the Court observed that the RBI was an autonomous institution responsible for maintaining the financial integrity of the country and enjoyed broad powers to govern activities that impact the monetary, credit and payments systems in India.

The latest judgment came almost two years after the RBI, through a circular, had prohibited the use of virtual currency. The circular forbade entities regulated by the RBI from dealing with or providing services to individuals or business entities dealing with or settling virtual currencies. All entities which were already involved in the provision of the aforementioned services were asked to wind down in three months. Cryptocurrency tokens could undermine international policy frameworks such as the AML (anti-money laundering) and FATF (Financial Action Task Force), designed to counter money laundering and terrorist financing, RBI had posited. It could also adversely impact market integrity and capital control, RBI’s deputy governor, BP Kanungo had further explained at a press conference on April 5th, 2018.

This led to the closing of many fledgling crypto exchanges within the country. Koinex, India’s largest crypto exchange was shut down because of the circular.  Unocoin, one of the early entrants in the bitcoin space in India, resumed fiat deposits on March 5, 2020, after suspending it in the summer of 2018. Unocoin had to lay off 50 percent of its employees after the ban. India has already lost valuable time, money, talent in a promising industry.

It is believed that the government and the RBI have similar opinions on cryptocurrencies. In February 2018, in his budget speech, then Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had categorically said that ‘the government does not recognise cryptocurrency as legal tender or coin and will take all measures to eliminate the use of these crypto-assets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payments system’. An inter-ministerial committee also submitted its recommendations on July 22, 2019, and suggested banning private cryptocurrencies and criminalisation of activities related to VCs. The committee also submitted a draft bill - Banning of Cryptocurrency & Regulation of Official Digital Currency Bill, 2019. The current Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has said that ‘countries will have to show extreme caution on cryptocurrencies.

It will take much more to kickstart a decimated industry. Sensing the inclinations within the Finance Ministry and the RBI, and having been at the receiving end once before, the banks are likely to be circumspect in lending to the crypto exchanges.

A consistent policy framework needed

Coherent policy action by the government is required now. The government must identify the policy objective it wishes to achieve. These objectives would be a combination of checking money laundering, preventing terrorist financing, promoting greater financial inclusion, and ensuring financial stability. Evaluating all options and analysing empirical data and then choosing the most effective and less invasive measure is necessary.

RBI set up a sandbox for testing fintech products in April 2019. Opening this sandbox to cryptocurrencies as well would enable companies to live-test their new products in a controlled environment. This would not only promote innovation but also enhance the knowledge and awareness about cryptocurrency projects amongst the government officials, allowing them to take appropriate regulatory measures if and when global players such as Facebook launch their products in India.

The government should set up a specialised cryptocurrency advisory council that would liaise with multiple stakeholders in the government, industry, academia and suggest enabling regulation for the industry in India. The advisory council would be cognisant of the legislations in different parts of the world and conduct India-focused studies and recommend measures suited to the Indian landscape.

The Supreme Court judgment is a small step in the long road towards realising the immense potential of cryptocurrency and the government should leverage this opportunity to inspire confidence and implement progressive legislation.

 (Utkarsh Narain is a technology policy researcher at Takshashila Institution, a centre for research and education in public policy in Bengaluru. This commentary was published in Deccan Chronicle on March 12. The views expressed are personal.)

Using Tech to Deal with Covid-19 Is Problematic

Covid-19 has taken the world by storm. With Covid-19 being classified as a pandemic, recent predictions claim that within the coming year, 40-70% of people around the world will be affected with Covid-19 (including mild disease or an asymptomatic form). In a sense, China being the epicenter of the outbreak has reluctantly taken the world through a learning curve on how technology intersects with the policy in public health emergencies.As the number of cases rose in China, the ruling party’s response has been interesting. Since early February, China has been encouraging citizens to return to work. But while the Government does that, it has also begun efforts to regulate people’s movement through smartphones. Currently, the system is present in 200 cities and is being rolled out nationwide. Users fill in a form on the Alipay app with their personal details and are presented with a QR code, which can be green, yellow, or red. If your code is green, you are free to move about unrestricted. A yellow code means staying at home for a week, whereas a red means a two-week quarantine.On the surface, it makes sense. People who are predicted to be at risk should take precautions to ensure they don’t spread the virus. Software is a great medium to help achieve that. In a pandemic of this scale and seriousness, workers in public places like metro stations, subways, and residential societies should have the power to check who may be a contagion risk.But once you take a closer look, it becomes evident that tech does not always mirror society. People do not always fall neatly into green, yellow, and red signals. Data that classifies people may be riddled with biases. Algorithms may come to unjustified and false conclusions that put people at risk. Data shared with law enforcement agencies infringe on people’s privacy. All of this is evident now, making China an excellent case study to learn from.The New York Times has done exceptional reporting on this. In a particular case, Leon Lei, 29, was allotted a green code on Alipay before leaving his hometown, Anqing, to return to work in Hangzhou. A day before he departed, his code turned red, seemingly for no apparent reason. It is hard to say why the code changed and what parameters the algorithm used to detect the possibility of people being at risk. A working theory could be that Leon’s hometown, while itself not being a hotbed for the virus, borders Hubei Province — the center of the outbreak. As a result, the software decided to change its color. But it is hard to know for sure.Had location been the deciding factor in the code changing its color, then it is safe to assume that an increasing number of people in Anqing would get red codes, even if they are not at risk. This would make it harder for them to move to safer areas. Vanessa Wong faced this situation when she had no symptoms and her code suddenly turned red. Her employer and housing complex needed green codes for entry, leaving her stranded in Hubei. In addition, personal data shared by the users send location and an identifier to the police.This brings us to a larger question. What is a responsible way to use tech in such emergencies? State capacity is limited and technology is a handy tool that allows governments to bridge gaps. But as China teaches us, such solutions have very significant limitations. They do not mirror society accurately, can be biased, infringe on privacy, and have the potential to do considerable harm.This is why monitoring apps, such as Alipay need to be more transparent. It is better to disclose what data is being collected and how much weightage each parameter will be given. Citizens would then have the basic know-how of why their codes turned green and what they can do to be safer. It is because there is little to no transparency in the Alipay process, forcing uninfected citizens to be stranded and putting them at risk.People often tend to claim that technology is just a tool. It is value-neutral and does not defer between groups. It seems like a benign sentence but is dangerously misleading. When it comes to outcomes, history, and China today teach us that tech ends up choosing winners and losers, unintentionally so. Covid-19 is a crisis that should not be wasted in teaching us that.This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Views are personal.

Why Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's $10 bn to fight climate change may not help

This article was first published in the Deccan Herald.Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos recently announced through an Instagram post that he would donate $ 10 Billion from his personal wealth to the newly created Bezos Earth Fund to fight climate change. The global initiative will fund scientists, activists, and NGOs according to the social media post. However, questions such as when will the money be disbursed, whether the fund will be a private foundation, a limited liability corporation, or a donor-advised fund remain unanswered.In recent years, we are seeing increased instances of giving by mega billionaires. Warren Buffet committed a majority of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Mark Zuckerberg also pledged 99 per cent of his Facebook shares to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, soon after the birth of his daughter in 2015. Billionaires like Infosys’ Nilekanis and Wipro's Azim Premji have signed the ‘Giving Pledge’, committing the majority of their wealth. Bezos, who hasn’t signed the ‘Giving Pledge’ is the latest to jump onto the strategic philanthropy bandwagon.While the individual grant by Bezos is laudable, fighting the adverse effects of climate change will require ‘collective action from big companies, small companies, nation-states, global organisations, and individuals, as Bezos’s post acknowledges. Thus, to understand the direction the fund takes, it makes sense to analyse the policies and actions of Amazon with regard to climate change over the years.On September 19, 2019, Amazon signed ‘The Climate Pledge’ and committed to achieving the requirements of the Paris Agreement by 2040, ten years in advance of the 2050 deadline. For the record, Amazon releases 128.9 grams CO2 equivalent per dollar (USD) of Gross Merchandise Sales (GMS). It aims to fulfil 80 per cent of its energy requirements across all businesses, through renewable energy, by 2024 and raise the share to 100 per cent by 2030. Investing $100 million in reforestation projects around the world and securing a fleet of 100,000 electric delivery vehicles also feature as goals in the Amazon Sustainability Report 2019. Approximately 80 per cent of Amazon’s total emissions, which equal 44.40 Million Metric Tons (mmt) CO₂ equivalent, come from indirect sources -- corporate purchases and Amazon-branded product emissions, as well as third-party transportation, packaging upstream energy-related emissions forming the majority.Amazon’s treatment of the climate action activists from within the company who formed the Amazon Employees for Climate Justice group in April 2019 has been less than encouraging. An open letter, signed by 8,702 employees, to Jeff Bezos and the Board of Directors, asked the company to ‘adopt the climate plan shareholder resolution and release a company-wide climate plan’ to tackle the climate crisis. Bezos used his influence and 16 per cent stake to vote down the proposal in the Annual General Meeting of Amazon’s shareholders. However, the support that the group garnered from other stakeholders in the company made Bezos relook his position and lead to the birth of the above-mentioned ‘Climate Pledge’.The climate group has also urged Amazon to shift to renewable sources for Amazon Web Services, its most profitable business. Amazon continues to award contracts to fossil fuel companies for powering its data centres for cloud services. Amazon is not alone in this regard. Big Tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, are building partnerships with fossil fuel companies to leverage Artificial Intelligence to extract more oil from the earth efficiently. It remains to be seen if Amazon breaks the trend and puts its mouth where the money is. Amazon also sponsored a gala by the Competitive Enterprise Institute – a free-market think tank that engages in climate change denial.Governments have a significant role when it comes to spending to fight climate change. The Paris Climate Accord was also signed between countries and not companies (even though Amazon did make a pledge). Governments are better actors to fight climate change because the trade-offs they face are inherently different than private companies. For example, when Amazon claims that it was to be carbon neutral, it will have to revise its practices to achieve that goal. That could mean cutting corners and making compromises when the company’s own interests are at stake. Governments are long-term and do not face the threat of extinction, unlike private enterprises. This provides ministries and departments with the luxury of a longer-term vision.When you take that into account, it makes sense to better fund governments by paying taxes rather than donating personal wealth through commitments made on Instagram. However, Amazon has not been a great taxpayer. From 2008 to 2018, Amazon has paid $1.5 billion in corporate taxes. It’s closest competitor, Walmart, has paid $64 billion by comparison. Keep in mind that between September 2008 and September 2018, the value of Amazon’s stock grew more than twenty-four times from $78.3 to $1,915. During the same period, Walmart’s stock price went from $59.73 to $94.59. Amazon should have paid a lot more in taxes than $64 billion, and yet it ended up paying $1.5 billion.Putting the prior actions of Amazon with regard to policies, treatments of employees, investments in fossil fuel companies, and low taxes paid into perspective, the $10 billion individual grant is not close to what Amazon can do to minimise its carbon footprint and fight climate change. It is a welcome gesture, but we need much more to confront this global challenge.(Utkarsh Narain and Rohan Seth are technology policy analysts at the Takshashila Institution, an independent centre for research and education in public policy in Bengaluru.)

Privacy Is Not Dead, It Is Terminally Ill

This article was first published in Deccan Chronicle. Earlier last week, The Verge ran a story about how health apps had permissions to change their terms of service without the user’s knowledge. If you are a former alcoholic who tracks how many days it has been since your last cigarette or a depressed professional who is keeping a record of how your days are progressing, that is horrible news. It sets the precedent that it does not matter what conditions you agreed to once you signed up for the app. Thus, your information can and likely will be sold to companies that may want to sell you alcohol or medication. The news comes as a shock to most people who read it, especially considering the personal and sensitive nature of health data. But that is the nature of terms and conditions that technology companies set out in their agreements today. A significant source of revenue for tech products and applications is the data they sell to their clients based on your usage. And it does not make sense to keep asking you for new kinds of permissions every time they want to track or access something. Instead, it works better to have a long-form document that is widely encompassing and grants them all the permissions they might ever need, including the permission to change the terms of the agreement after you signed. After all, no one reads the privacy policies before clicking, ‘I Agree’. This was on display earlier last year when Chaayos started facial recognition, and Nikhil Pahwa went through their privacy policy to unearth this line, “Customer should not expect, that customer’s personal information should always remain private”. The rest of the privacy policy essentially conveyed that Chaayos collects customer data but does not guarantee privacy. And Chaayos is not the cause of an extremely exploitative attitude towards data; it is a symptom. The history of the internet and the revenue model it gave birth to, has led to this point where access to information is a paramount need. If you want a better understanding of it, the New York Times did an excellent job tracing the history of Google’s privacy policy which does serve as a history of the internet. Because of how little regulation existed in the internet space when it was a sunrise industry, the frontrunners today ran with our data on their terms. During all of this, consent has been virtually non-existent. I use the word virtually consciously. Consent has largely been a placeholder during the internet’s rich history. There are two reasons why. Firstly, terms and conditions lead to consent fatigue. Even the best of lawyers do not go through the conditions for every app before they click accept. Secondly, let’s say you press the decline button when asked for additional permissions. Apps are known then to bypass the OS’ permission system without consent to gather that data. But let’s say that we live in an ideal world and apps don’t do that. You manage to read a few agreements and make a conscious decision to accept. You are happy to give your consent for access to the microphone but not the location and thus, deny permission. There is a chance that it still doesn’t matter. Consents tend to be interlinked because of the nature of the internet and smartphone apps. For instance, consider the automation app, ‘If This Then That (IFTTT)’. It serves as a platform to automate functions across multiple services. For instance, it can log in every trip you take on Uber to a Google Sheet. Sounds like a helpful tip to keep track of and claim work reimbursements, doesn’t it? But if you do use that service, you are subject to three interlinked policies, Uber’s, GSuite’s, and IFTTT’s. At this point, any data you generate from that automation will likely be sold for profit. How do we tackle something like this? How do we make sure that privacy is respected more and companies cannot change their agreements once you click accept? Google took a small step towards it by introducing in-context permissions in Android 10. The idea was that if an app wanted additional permissions, say access to your microphone, or your location, it would ask you when it needed it, and not front-load all requests. We are yet to see how effective it is going to be over time.  At their best, in-context permissions will tell you why PayTM needs access to your location (because they likely need that information in case there is a fraud), or that your SMS app has been recording your location in the background for no apparent reason. At their worst, they make consent fatigue worse. In context, permissions are likely not the only answer, but it’s a start. Google implementing it is a definite sign that privacy is not dead, just terminally ill. Given time, and combined with measures such as simplified permissions, our generation might see a day when we completely control our data. Views are personal.