The Centre for Internet and Society
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Staying silent about cyberbullying is no longer an option
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-16-2019-staying-silent-about-cyberbullying-is-no-longer-an-option
<b>Cyberbullying is the dangerous new normal.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was published in the <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/cyberbullying-is-the-dangerous-new-normal-5780934/">Indian Express</a> on June 16, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">I found myself in three very different contexts these last couple of weeks, bound together by a normalising of cyberbullying. The first was a conversation with a professor, who had punished a group of students in her class for disruptive behaviour involving their cellphones. As a form of retaliation, they photoshopped her face in a set of pornographic and explicitly profane images and made her into a meme. In the course of a week, many others piled on to this viral phenomenon, and the professor was now suddenly finding her private information, and her face being shared and commented on in ways that she could not control or process. When the four students responsible for the first meme were identified and questioned, their first reaction was that they couldn’t understand what the problem was. “This is what everybody does these days,” was their first collective response. While they were punished and made to recognise their crime, the images of this professor are here to stay on multiple social media sites, with more people sharing them faster than they can be removed.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a very different setting, one of my friends, who has an 11-year-old son, called me frantically, because she found a steady stream of abusive messages on her son’s phone, targeted at him. These messages were on a closed-group social media platform consisting of students from his school. Her son, apparently, had reported some other kids bullying on the school ground and the chastised bullies had taken to tormenting him online. Calls to the school, inquiries from the principal, attempts at mediating and reconciliation had all fallen on deaf ears. When my friend suggested that her son get off the platform, he was in tears, and adamant that his social life will be over and he has to just stay on, and pay his dues. “Everybody has to pay for what they did. This will also get over,” he said, justifying the bullying and mob attacks that he was being subjected to.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">On Reddit channels, I witnessed a furious fight about the suicide of Dr Payal Salman Tadvi — the medical doctor who gave in to depression and, eventually, death, after being bullied by three senior doctors who decided that her caste origins offended their professional sensibilities. The thread was started to talk about caste-based discrimination in contemporary Indian workspaces. It was soon taken over by people using this incident to call people of different castes weak, low-willed, and entitled snowflakes, who could not take hardship because they have been coddled by affirmative action. The irony of this argument aside, the one thing that they kept on insisting was that this act of bullying was not about caste at all because “everybody gets bullied and they have to be strong to fight back” or there is no hope for survival.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In all of these three very different cases, scattered around three different continents and privileges, one thing stands out. Cyberbullying is not just here but it seems to have been naturalised and accepted as the new normal. Thus, instead of stopping these acts, the focus seems to be on helping people cope with it. Similarly, the efforts are directed not at calling out such acts, but at supporting victims to see it through, without any structural respite.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-16-2019-staying-silent-about-cyberbullying-is-no-longer-an-option'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-16-2019-staying-silent-about-cyberbullying-is-no-longer-an-option</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-07-02T03:52:22ZBlog EntryData bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers
<b>This is an excerpt from an essay by Sadaf Khan, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.</b>
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<h4>Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: <a href="https://deepdives.in/data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers-8766dc6a1e00" target="_blank">Data bleeding everywhere: a story of period trackers</a></h4>
<h4>Sadaf Khan: <a href="http://mediamatters.pk/the-team/" target="_blank">Media Matters for Democracy</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/nuqsh" target="_blank">Twitter</a></h4>
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<p>...By now there are a number of questions buzzing around my head, most of them unasked. Are users comfortable with so much of their data being collected? Are there really algorithms that string together all this data into medically-relevant trends? How reliable can these trends be when usage is erratic? Are period tracking apps pioneering, fundamental elements of a future where medical aid is digital and reliable data is inevitably linked to the provision of medical services? And if so, are privacy and health soon to become conflicting rights?</p>
<p>I also want to find out how users understand data collection and privacy before giving apps consent to utilize their data and information as they will. Hareem says she gives apps informed consent. ‘If my data becomes a part of the statistics aiding medical research, why not? There is no harm in it. I am getting a good service, and if my data helps create a better understanding as a part of a larger statistical pool, they are welcome to use it.’</p>
<p>But is she really sure that this information will be used only as anonymised data for medical research? ‘Look at the kind of information that is being collected,’ she answers. ‘Dates, mood, consistency of mucus, basal temperature. What kind of use does one have for this data?’</p>
<p>Naila, in turn, says: ‘Honestly, I have never really thought about what happens to the data the application collects. Obviously I enter detailed information about my cycle and my moods and my sex life. But a), my account is under a fake name and b), even if it wasn’t, who would have any use for stuff like when my period starts and ends and what my mood or digestive system is like at any given moment?’</p>
<p>In fact, this sentiment is shared among all the women interviewed for this piece — what use would anyone have for this data?</p>
<p>As users, we often imagine our own data as anonymised within a huge dataset. But as users, we don’t have enough information about how our data is being used — or will be used in future. The open and at times vague language of a platform’s terms and conditions allows menstrual apps to use data in ways that I may not know of. Some apps continue to hold customer data even after an account is deleted. Even though I may technically ‘agree’ to the terms and conditions, is this fully informed consent?</p>
<p>One of the big concerns around this kind of medical information being collected is the potential for collaborations with big pharmaceuticals and other health service providers. With apps sitting on a goldmine of users’ fertility and health information, health service providers might mine their data for potential consumers and reach out directly to them. While this is like any targeted marketing campaign, the fact that the advertiser is likely to be offering medical services to women suffering from infertility and are at their most vulnerable, raises totally different ethical concerns.</p>
<p>And these apps and their businesses might grow in directions that users haven’t taken into consideration. Take Ovia’s health feature for companies to buy premium services for their employees. While the gesture is packaged as a goodwill one, it also means that an employer has access to extremely private and intimate medical information about their women employees. And while the data set is anonymised, it is still possible to figure out the identity of users based on specific information. For example, how many women in any company are pregnant at any given time?...</p>
<p>Pregnant a year after my miscarriage, I initially downloaded multiple apps in a bid to find a good fit. I don’t know which one of these was in communication with Facebook. But almost immediately, my Facebook timeline started becoming littered with ads for baby stuff — clothes, shoes bibs, prams, cribs, ointments for stretch marks, maternity wear, the works.</p>
<p>It makes me think of those old school clockwork-style videos. You drop a ball and off it goes: making dominos fall, knocking over pots and pans, setting in motion absurd, synchronized mechanisms. Similarly, I drop my data and watch it hurtle into my life, on to other platforms, off to vendors. Maybe to stalkers? To employers? Who knows.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/sadaf-khan-data-bleeding-everywhere-a-story-of-period-trackers</a>
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No publishersumandroBodies of EvidenceResearchers at WorkResearchFeaturedPublicationsBD4DBig Data for Development2019-12-06T05:03:09ZBlog EntryCan data ever know who we really are?
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are
<b>This is an excerpt from an essay by Zara Rahman, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: <a href="https://deepdives.in/can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are-a0dbfb5a87a0" target="_blank">Can data ever know who we really are?</a></h4>
<h4>Zara Rahman: <a href="https://www.theengineroom.org/people/zara-rahman/" target="_blank">The Engine Room</a>, <a href="https://zararah.net/" target="_blank">Website</a>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/zararah" target="_blank">Twitter</a></h4>
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<blockquote>If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.<br /><em>– <a href="https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1982-audre-lorde-learning-60s/" target="_blank">Audre Lorde</a></em></blockquote>
<p>The proliferation of digital data and the technologies that allow us to gather that data can be used in another way too — to allow us to define for ourselves who we are, and what we are.</p>
<p>Amidst a growing political climate of fear, mistrust and competition for resources, activists and advocates working in areas that are stigmatised within their societies often need data to ‘prove’ that what they are working on matters. One way of doing this is by gathering data through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourced data isn’t ‘representative’, as statisticians say, but gathering data through unofficial means can be a valuable asset for advocates. For example, <a href="http://readytoreport.in/" target="_blank">data collating the experiences of women</a> who have reported incidents of sexual violence to the police in India, can then be used to advocate for better police responses, and to inform women of their rights. Deservedly or not, quantifiable data takes precedence over personal histories and lived experience in getting the much-desired currency of attention.</p>
<p>And used right, quantifiable data — whether it’s crowdsourced or not — can also be a powerful tool for advocates. Now, we can use quantifiable data to prove beyond a question of a doubt that disabled people, queer people, people from lower castes, face intersecting discrimination, prejudice, and systemic injustices in their lives. It’s an unnecessary repetition in a way, because anybody from those communities could have told reams upon reams of stories about discrimination — all without any need for counting.</p>
<p>Regardless, to play within this increasingly digitised system, we need to repeat what we’ve been saying in a new, digitally-legible way. And to do that, we need to collect data from people who have often only ever been de-humanised as data subjects.</p>
<p>Artist and educator Mimi Onuoha writes about <a href="https://points.datasociety.net/the-point-of-collection-8ee44ad7c2fa#.y0xtfxi2p" target="_blank">the challenges that arise while collecting such data</a>, from acknowledging the humans behind that collection to understanding that missing data points might tell just as much of a story as the data that has been collected. She outlines how digital data means that we have to (intentionally or not) make certain choices about what we value. And the collection of this data means making human choices solid, and often (though not always) making these choices illegible to others.</p>
<p>We speak of black boxes when it comes to <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/breaking-the-black-box-what-facebook-knows-about-you" target="_blank">the mystery choices that algorithms make</a>, but the same could be said of the many human decisions that are made in categorising data too, whether that be choosing to limit the gender drop-down field to just ‘male/female’ as with Fitbits, or a variety of apps incorrectly assuming that all people who menstruate <a href="https://medium.com/@maggied/i-tried-tracking-my-period-and-it-was-even-worse-than-i-could-have-imagined-bb46f869f45" target="_blank">also want to know about their ‘fertile window’</a>. In large systems with many humans and machines at work, we have no way of interrogating why a category was merged or not, of understanding why certain anomalies were ignored rather than incorporated, or of questioning why certain assumptions were made.</p>
<p>The only thing we can do is to acknowledge these limitations, and try to use those very systems to our advantage, building our own alternatives or workarounds, collecting our own data, and using the data that is out there to tell the stories that matter to us.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/zara-rahman-can-data-ever-know-who-we-really-are</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroBodies of EvidenceBig DataData SystemsResearchers at WorkResearchPublicationsBD4DBig Data for Development2019-12-06T05:02:53ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Three things we need to realise about what TikTok is doing to us
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us
<b>Fifteen seconds is all that will take for TikTok to own you.
</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-times-up-tiktok-5731290/">Indian Express</a> on May 19, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">If there is one thing that has been building more suspense and drama than our politicians this election season, it is the microblogging site TikTok. From complete ignominy to viral popularity, and then the dramatic ban by a high court to its resurgence offering Rs 1,00,000 daily reward prizes, #ReturnofTikTok has been trending with great enthusiasm and being embraced by the populace, who obviously think that 15-second videos are the pinnacle of human cultural production and expression. But, my friends, followers, TikTokers, I come here not to bury TikTok, but to praise it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At first glance, TikTok appears to be just a miniaturised version of the popular social media platforms we know — YouTube, Vine, Snapchat — and merely one more step in figuring out how granular we can make our appified attention. With each video post that can only last 15 seconds, TikTok is often heralded as naturalising the new unit of attention in an informationally saturated environment. Many have looked at it as competition to the grandfathers of social media apps, like <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/facebook/">Facebook</a> and Instagram, and there is much speculation about how it will take these giants down.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, the radical departure of TikTok is not in the smallness of its engagement — and thus the extremely low threshold for participation — or in the hashtag organisation of its social media, and the subsequent viral potentiality. What makes TikTok tick (and then, of course, tock), is its embrace of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to power the platform.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">China-based ByteDance that owns TikTok, unlike any of its Big Tech competitors, is not a content production or curation company. It is invested in machine learning, and at its backend are extremely sophisticated algorithms that are using facial recognition, data correlation, and targeted customisation technologies to create the world of TikTok. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the two templates of “user-generated-content” platforms, where what we see, what we do, and what we say require us to define our social circles and connections, TikTok’s algorithms do not need us to do any social definition.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From the minute you sign up for it, giving up your personal information and data to extreme mining which bears the same pitfalls of privacy and surveillance that all other big data apps do, TikTok starts presenting content to you. This is not content created by friends, or colleagues, or randos you connect with because you couldn’t be bothered to decline their invites. Instead, this is content created by people you don’t know at all, and brought to you by algorithms that know, even without you telling them what you might like. The more time you spend tapping across the vides, searching hashtags, and going through complex tutorials to make your own 15-second fun video, the more the machine learning algorithms learn you.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">TikTok is such a threat to existing social media companies because they make no apologies of the fact that their human users are not influencers, friends, followers, or connections. They are merely users, who produce content and then their algorithms go around the world, connecting us through reasons and logic that are completely opaque. With TikTok, we see the future of automated technologies, where both the content and the logic of connectivity are no longer dependent on human action or desire, but on algorithmic curation and presentation. Geared towards maximum engagement, TikTok’s algorithms have one task — to completely make us lose all sense of time as we cycle through an almost endless stream of videos that have neither content nor style, but seduce us in their short-lived flash.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">TikTok as a platform might turn out to be another fad. It is already being copied and mimicked by others. It might run out of its global steam. However, what it has opened up for us are three critical things that need more attention in our digital action. First, on TikTok, you don’t have friends because your friend is TikTok, and it tells you, in an easy, gossipy way, all the things that everybody else is doing. Second, TikTok does not pretend to respect individual choice and agency, instead it trains us to accept what is presented as content. In many ways, it is the reverse Spotify — your playlist does not represent your taste in music, but the music shapes you to become the kind of person who likes that music. And, lastly, TikTok infantilises its users, embedding them in a juvenilia, which has no meaning other than the moving images that keep us engaged but distant, responsive but irresponsible, as children of all ages, ready to escape from a world that increasingly seems too complex to live in.</p>
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<p>Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Time’s Up’</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-06-09T05:27:52ZBlog EntryDigital Native: Narendra Modi’s interview by Akshay Kumar is a PR masterpiece
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece
<b>How to spot the influencer in your politics.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was<a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-two-good-men-5706670/"> published in Indian Express </a>on May 5, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Your digital age can easily be measured by one simple concept: the influencer. In descending order of age, there are people who have no idea what it means, those who roll their eyes at the word, those who have friends who are influencers, those who are, or think of themselves as, influencers. Despite studying and following (and sheepishly trying to imitate) influencers on social media, I still find it difficult to explain lucidly who exactly an influencer is, and what it is that she does.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>A</span><span>n influencer is a person who has many followers on social media and they influence the behaviour of these followers. They are not celebrities who influence others, but they are celebrities because they can influence others. They are not famous like traditional stars, but they are stars because so many people listen to them. They are famous for being famous, but, more importantly, they are famous as themselves — as authentic, genuine, real people who you like, and, hence, listen to. So great is the influencer phenomenon that celebrities are now adopting the genre. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span></span><span>The best example of this is the video interview of Prime Minister </span><a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/narendra-modi">Narendra Modi</a><span> by Bollywood star </span><a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/akshay-kumar/">Akshay Kumar</a><span>. Modi, who is looking to repeat his historic electoral victory of 2014, is right now undeniably the biggest political figure of our times. His promises of development, politics of resilience, and affinity for controversial alliances make him not only an extraordinary figure in India, but also stitches him into a larger global shift towards conservative populism.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Akshay Kumar, while he might not be one of the Khans, has emerged as the “common man’s hero”, especially since his last few films have focused on a persistent, if ham-handed, social messaging about critical questions of infrastructure, gender and family in the Indian psyche. So much so, that many critics had speculated if Akshay Kumar was prepping to run for elections, following in the grand tradition of many cinema stars who crossed over from the silver screen to politics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Individually, and together, Modi and Kumar are two larger-than-life celebrities. And yet, when they came together for an interview, which was historical for several reasons — it emerged in the middle of the elections in the country and it was streamed across digital and TV platforms — they did not talk about their respective renown, portfolios or messages. Instead, they staged an “apolitical” interview, during the course of which we learned about Modi’s preference for Gujarati mangoes and ascetic discipline, and realised that the credit for Kumar’s success has to go to his directors, if this is his repertoire of acting skills.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Or, in other words, these two celebrities came together to make an influencer video — where the banal, the everyday, and the casual are used to create subtle messaging that shapes and nudges the behaviour and taste of the networked user, who is consuming the long interview as an act of eavesdropping on two regular people. This influencer aesthetic is particularly different from the gossipy antics of producer-director <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/karan-johar/">Karan Johar</a>, with his obviously celebrity friends who joke about nepotism and laugh about how, when you are a star, they let you get away with anything.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This video might be a PR masterpiece, not because it fills up the vacuum that the delayed release of Modi’s fictional biopic had created, but because in a politically saturated environment, it chose to be airy, fluffy and chatty, thus deescalating the tense atmosphere that surrounds this current election.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We might find it difficult to follow Modi the leader, but Narendra Modi the everyday man, who decided to step up and serve his country, is hard to fault. This video saw NaMo and Akki taking the influencer aesthetic to shape the political message that amplifies Modi as our leader.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the meantime, the Opposition leaders in Congress, who desperately need a digital strategist team, did exactly the one thing they should have avoided — they took the bait of the video and went around shouting against it, thus driving more people to watch it, and giving them a chance to overcome their political preferences and relate to Modi as a human being. The Opposition strategy led to a Streisand effect, where the more they negated and critiqued, the more the video went viral, and, in an election that is already poised on a hair’s breadth, it might not be a surprise if the final vote shall be won, not by celebrity endorsements, but by influencer virality.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><i>Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Two Good Men’</i></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-06-09T03:20:27ZBlog EntryApril 2019 Newsletter
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2019-newsletter
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for April 2019.</b>
<h3><span>Highlights for March 2019</span></h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The unprecedented growth of the fintech space in India has concomitantly come with regulatory challenges around inter alia privacy and security concerns. Aayush Rathi and Shweta Mohandas <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/aayush-rathi-and-shweta-mohandas-april-30-2019-fintech-in-india-a-study-of-privacy-and-security-commitments">have co-authored a report</a> which has analysed the privacy policies of 48 fintech companies operating in India to better understand some of these concerns.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">In today’s increasingly digitized world where an increasing volume of information is being stored in the digital format, access to data generated by digital technologies and on digital platforms is important in solving crimes online and offline. One such mechanism for international cooperation is the Convention on Cybercrime adopted in Budapest (“Budapest Convention”). Vipul Kharbanda <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/vipul-kharbanda-april-29-2019-international-cooperation-in-cybercrime-the-budapest-convention">has provided a deeper analysis</a> on this in his research paper.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS has responded to ICANN's proposed renewal of .org Registry. CIS has found severe issues with the proposed agreement. These centre around the removal of price caps and imposing obligations being currently deliberated in an ongoing Policy Development Process. Akriti Bopanna <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-april-28-2019-cis-response-to-icanns-proposed-renewal-of-org-registry">drafted the response</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion released a draft e-commerce policy in February for which stakeholder comments were sought. CIS <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-response-to-call-for-stakeholder-comments-draft-e-commerce-policy">responded to the request for comments</a>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS Access to Knowledge team (CIS-A2K) <a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ananth-subray-april-15-2019-cis-a2k-proposal-to-wikimedia-foundation-for-2019-2020">has submitted its proposal form for the year 2019 - 2020</a> to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS thanks all community members who gave valuable suggestions and inputs for drafting this proposal.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-align: justify; ">In 2017–2018, the </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Foundation" style="text-align: justify; " title="Wikimedia Foundation">Wikimedia Foundation</a><span style="text-align: justify; "> (WMF) and Google collaborated to start a pilot project in India, working closely with the </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/CIS-A2K" style="text-align: justify; " title="CIS-A2K">Centre for Internet and Society</a><span style="text-align: justify; "> (CIS) and the </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_India" style="text-align: justify; " title="Wikimedia India">Wikimedia India</a><span style="text-align: justify; ">chapter (WMIN). <span style="text-align: justify; ">This project, titled Project Tiger was aimed at encouraging Wikipedia communities to create locally relevant and high-quality content in Indian languages. </span>CIS-A2K team submitted Project Tiger final report.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span style="text-align: justify; ">The <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog">r@w blog </a>features works by researchers and practitioners working in India and elsewhere at the intersections of internet, digital media and society, and highlights and materials from ongoing research and events at the researchers@work programme at CIS. On the r@w blog we featured an essay titled <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination-4b7434bd2353">'The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination'</a> by Divij Joshi, as part of a series on <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india">Studying Internet in India (2015)</a>; and audio recording of a session titled <a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/objectsofdigitalgovernance-ec4194a24bb">#ObjectsofDigitalGovernance </a>by Khetrimayum Monish Singh, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Vidya Subramanian which was part of the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17">Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.</a><br /></span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>Jobs</h3>
<p>CIS is hiring:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-a2k-finance-officer-call-for-application">CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application</a> (Only women candidates).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/jobs/internship">Internship</a><span> - applications accepted throughout the year.</span></li>
</ul>
<h3></h3>
<h3><br />CIS and the News</h3>
<p>The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-april-3-2019-shyam-ponappa-delayed-cash-flows-and-npas">Delayed Cash Flows and NPAs</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 3, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindustan-times-april-16-2019-gurshabad-grover-to-preserve-freedoms-online-amend-it-act">To preserve freedoms online, amend the IT Act</a> (Gurshabad Grover; April 16, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze">Digital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze</a> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; April 21, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<div></div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3><br />CIS in the News</h3>
<p>CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-sai-sachin-ravikumar-april-3-2019-reddit-telegram-among-websites-blocked-in-india">Reddit, Telegram among websites blocked in India, say internet groups</a> (Sai Sachin Ravikumar; Business Standard; April 3, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/quartz-india-aria-thaker-april-4-2019-data-leaks-and-cybersecurity-should-be-an-election-issue-in-india">Data leaks could wreak havoc in India, so why aren’t they an issue this election?</a> (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; April 4, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-sweta-akundi-april-8-2019-microchips-cookies-and-the-internet-privacy-authentication">Cookies, not the monster you may think</a> (Sweta Akundi; Hindu; April 8, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/india-today-april-17-2019-gulam-jeelani-tik-tok-craze-a-ticking-time-bomb-for-city">TikTok craze a ticking time bomb for city</a> (Gulam Jeelani with inputs from Priyanka Sharma and Ajay Kumar; India Today; April 17, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ananya-bhattacharya-quartz-india-april-19-2019-india-bans-tiktok-over-porn-but-not-facebook-twitter-instagram">Almost every social network has a porn problem—so why is India banning only TikTok?</a> (Ananya Bhattacharya; Quartz India; April 19, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/leon-kaiser-netzpolitik-april-24-2019-jugendschutz-und-cyber-grooming-indisches-gericht-hebt-eigenen-tiktok-bann-wieder-auf">Child protection and cyber-grooming: Indian court rescinds its own Tiktok ban</a> (Leon Kaiser; Netzpolitik.org; April 24, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<div></div>
<ul>
</ul>
<div></div>
<h2><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipdedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p><strong>Project Proposal / Reports</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/supporting-indian-language-wikipedias-program-report">Supporting Indian Language Wikipedias Program/Report </a><span>(Gopala Krishna A; April 5, 2019).</span></li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/ananth-subray-april-15-2019-cis-a2k-proposal-to-wikimedia-foundation-for-2019-2020">CIS-A2K proposal to Wikimedia Foundation for 2019-2020</a> (Ananth Subray; April 15, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p><span><br /><strong>Blog Entries</strong></span></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-april-9-2019-wikimedia-projects-session-at-tata-trust-vikas-anvesh-foundation">Wikimedia projects orientation session at Tata Trust's Vikas Anvesh Foundation</a> (Subodh Kulkarni; April 9, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/indic-wikisource-speak-sushant-savla">Indic Wikisource Speak: Sushant Savla</a> (Jayanta Nath; April 10, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-april-10-2019-svg-translation-workshop-at-kbc-north-maharashtra-university">SVG Translation Workshop at KBC North Maharashtra University </a>(Subodh Kulkarni; April 10, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/content-donation-sessions-with-authors">Content Donation Sessions with Authors</a> (Subodh Kulkarni; April 10, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/indic-wikisource-speak-ajit-kumar-tiwari">Indic Wikisource speak : Ajit Kumar Tiwari</a> (Jayanta Nath; April 11, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<h3><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance"><br />Internet Governance</a></h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber Security</h3>
<p><strong>Research Paper</strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/vipul-kharbanda-april-29-2019-international-cooperation-in-cybercrime-the-budapest-convention">International Cooperation in Cybercrime: The Budapest Convention</a> (Vipul Kharbanda; April 29, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p><strong>Research Paper</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/aayush-rathi-and-shweta-mohandas-april-30-2019-fintech-in-india-a-study-of-privacy-and-security-commitments">FinTech in India: A Study of Privacy and Security Commitments</a> (Aayush Rathi and Shweta Mohandas; April 30, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<div><strong>Submission</strong></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-response-to-call-for-stakeholder-comments-draft-e-commerce-policy">CIS Response to Call for Stakeholder Comments: Draft E-Commerce Policy</a> (Arindrajit Basu, Vipul Kharbanda, Elonnai Hickok and Amber Sinha; April 10, 2019).</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div></div>
<div><strong>Participation in Events</strong></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://http//cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ietf-104-prague">IETF 104 Prague</a> (Organized by IETF; Prague; March 23 - 29, 2019). Karan Saini and Gurshabad Grover participated in the event.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-phantom-public-the-role-of-social-media-in-democracy">The Phantom Public: The Role of Social Media in Democracy</a> (Organized by Ambedkar University; New Delhi; April 3, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/crea-reconference">(re) conference</a> (Organized by CREA; New Delhi; April 10 - 12, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/data-for-development-mapping-key-considerations-for-policy-and-practice-in-india">Data for Development: Mapping key considerations for policy and practice in India</a><span> (Organized by Azim Premchand University; April 24, 2019). Arindrajit Basu delivered a talk. </span></li>
</ul>
</div>
<h3>Artificial Intelligence</h3>
<p>Participation in Event</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/telecom/news/policy-lab-on-artificial-intelligence-democracy">Policy Lab on Artificial Intelligence & Democracy</a> (Organized by Tandem Research, in partnership with Microsoft Research and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung; Bangalore; April 2-3, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event. </li>
</ul>
<h3>Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p><strong>Submission</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-april-28-2019-cis-response-to-icanns-proposed-renewal-of-org-registry">CIS Response to ICANN's proposed renewal of .org Registry</a> (Akriti Bopanna; April 28, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
<p><strong>Event Organized</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/internet-speech-perspectives-on-regulation-and-policy">Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy</a> ( Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi; April 5, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Blog Entry</strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/akriti-bopanna-april-4-2019-didp-33-on-icann-s-2012-gtld-round-auction-fund">DIDP #33 On ICANN's 2012 gTLD round auction fund</a> (Akriti Bopanna; April 4, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<div></div>
<h2><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work (RAW)</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Announcement</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india">Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India</a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay; April 6, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination-4b7434bd2353">The Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination</a> (Divij Joshi; April 21, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/objectsofdigitalgovernance-ec4194a24bb">#ObjectsOfDigitalGovernance</a> (Khetrimayum Monish Singh, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Vidya Subramanian; April 21, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p><span>Telecom</span></p>
<p><strong>Article</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-april-3-2019-shyam-ponappa-delayed-cash-flows-and-npas">Delayed Cash Flows and NPAs </a>(Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; April 3, 2019 and Organizing India Blogspot; April 4, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Participation in Event</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/telecom/news/bif-conference-on-201csubstitutability-of-ott-services-with-telecom-services-regulation-of-ott-services">BIF conference on “Substitutability of OTT Services with Telecom Services & Regulation of OTT Services</a> (Organized by Broadband India Forum; Taj Mahal Hotel, Mansingh Road, New Delhi; April 5, 2019). Anubha Sinha was a panellist at a BIF conference on “Substitutability of OTT Services with Telecom Services & Regulation of OTT Services”.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
<p>► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<div>
<ul>
<li>Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a></li>
<li>Twitter - Access to Knowledge: <a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a></li>
<li>Twitter - Information Policy: <a href="https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy">https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy</a></li>
<li>Facebook - Access to Knowledge:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a></li>
<li>E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: <a>a2k@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>E-Mail - Researchers at Work: <a>raw@cis-india.org</a></li>
<li>List - Researchers at Work: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<p>► Support Us</p>
<div>Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</div>
<p>► Request for Collaboration</p>
<div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at <a>tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects</i>.</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2019-newsletter'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2019-newsletter</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaTelecomResearchers at WorkInternet GovernanceAccess to Knowledge2019-09-04T14:36:41ZPageDigital Native: Getting through an election made for the social media gaze
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze
<b>In the poll season, social media platforms thrive on wounded outrage disguised as politics.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-the-gaze-5682831/">published in Indian Express</a> on April 21, 2019.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">There is palpable excitement as the most populous democracy in the world goes out to vote. Last election, which saw the saffron sweep, we realised the role of social media platforms in electoral politics. From the controversial selfie by the aspiring Prime Minister flaunting the lotus symbol, that was reported as violating the advertisement rules set by the Election Commission, to the mass mobilisation of ideology-based voters, orchestrated by automated bots and the hashtag brigades of #acchedin, there was no denying that digital strategies are going to form the backend of a robust political campaign.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><aside class="o-story-content__related--large o-story-content__related">I<span>n a country of hypervisible lynch mobs staged via WhatsApp, polarised hatred exacerbated by armies of trolls, and the fluency with which hate speech has been normalised on the tweetosphere, social media and digital apps are front and centre in this election. People are coming out of voting booths and, even before the exit pollsters catch them, they are making Snapchat videos and “I voted” selfies, clearly identifying the parties they support. The verified social media accounts of leading political parties are doubling down on their poll promises of a communal purge of “infiltrators”, divine curses for the heretic who doesn’t vote for the “party of gods”, and threats of profiling if a community voted for the correct party and subsequent dire consequences. The door-to-door campaigning of the past has obviously been replaced by the tweet-to-tweet mixture of threats, cajoling, and blood lust that seems to set the tone for our current political climate.</span></aside></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">At the same time, the manifestos of the two leading coalitions, as well as the affidavits of the people running for office, are under deep public scrutiny. The <a href="https://indianexpress.com/about/bjp/">BJP</a>, in a Freudian blooper, announced itself as working for violence on women, incurring the sarcastic wrath of Twitter. One minister, who has been running through various cabinet positions, including education, was called to task to explain her wide repertoire of unverified degrees that change every voting season. Complaints against suspicious Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) have made themselves heard loudly on social-media discussion forums. And lately, the YouTube videos of people allegedly showing the easy removal of the indelible ink from the voting fingers, exploded into public view, jeopardising the integrity of the one-person-one-vote paradigm.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Social media, it would seem, is everywhere. And its ubiquity is ensuring that all stakeholders of the electoral process are performing for the social media gaze. Our leaders are talking in tweet-sized morsels, hoping to get their last messages in. The organisers of the massive process have taken to debunking false claims, providing verified information, and guiding people to their voting processes. The voters are not only wearing their party colours, but also canvassing for their favourite leaders, either through proclamations of patriotism or through emotional messages of voting against hate and discrimination. Voting groups are scrutinising and discussing the party manifestos and also the unexpected alliances coming into being in the quest of reaching the majority mark.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-april-21-2019-nishant-shah-getting-through-an-election-made-for-social-media-gaze</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDigital ActivismDigital IndiaDigital Natives2019-04-28T04:12:45ZBlog EntryManuel Beltrán - Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession
<b>Join us at the Delhi office of CIS on Thursday, April 4, at 5 pm for a talk by Manuel Beltrán, founder of the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO), which explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD), their current project at IoHO, explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance. </b>
<p> </p>
<p><img src="http://editors.cis-india.org/ManuelBeltran_IoHO.jpg/image_large" alt="Manuel Beltrán - IoHO" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Manuel Beltrán - IoHO" /></p>
<h6>Image credit: Manuel Beltrán</h6>
<h3>Institute of Human Obsolescence - Cartographies of Dispossession</h3>
<p>The Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) explores the future of labour and the changing relationship between humans and machine. Our work develops from a scenario in which forms of manual and intellectual labour traditionally performed by humans are increasingly automated by new technologies. In this context we investigate and challenge the socio-political and economic implications of new forms of labour, such as the production of data. The IoHO developed several projects exploring the production of data as a form of labour, as a different paradigm through which to interrogate and challenge dynamics of ownership over the production of data and the economic and governance objects emerging through it. Previous lines of inquiry around the framework of Data Labour Rights include Data Basic Income, Data Cooperative, Data Production Labour series, Investigative Discussion Sessions and Data Workers Union.</p>
<p>In this talk founder of the IoHO Manuel Beltrán, will introduce the work of the IoHO and discuss their current project Cartographies of Dispossession (CoD). CoD explores the forms of systematic data dispossession that different humans are subject to, and investigates how data becomes both the means of production as much as the means of governance. The project looks at the implications of how the dispossession of data unequally occurs in different contexts, through different means and for different purposes.</p>
<p>Instruments such as the Right Of Access provided by GDPR emerge from a European context but the flows of data operate in a transnational scale. We are exploring the potential and limits of this instrument in combination with others such as the Right To Information in India as tools to investigate and repossess our production of data across borders. We are particularly interested in feedback and discussing in how to think further about this last part.</p>
<h3>Manuel Beltrán</h3>
<p>Manuel is an artist and activist. He researches and lectures on contemporary art, activism, contemporary social movements, post-digital culture and new media. As an activist, he was involved in the Indignados movement in Spain, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey and several forms of independent activism and cyber-activism in Europe and beyond. In 2012 he co-founded the art collective Plastic Crowds and since 2013 he is head and co-founder of the nomadic school and artistic organization Alternative Learning Tank. In 2015 he founded the Institute of Human Obsolescence, through which he explores the future of labour, the social and political implications regarding our relationship with technology and the economic and governance systems surrounding the production of data.</p>
<h4><a href="http://speculative.capital">http://speculative.capital</a></h4>
<h4><a href="https://dataworkers.org">https://dataworkers.org</a></h4>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/manuel-beltran-ioho-cartographies-of-dispossession</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPracticeArtRAW EventsDigital LabourResearchers at WorkEvent2019-04-01T08:00:05ZEventMarch 2019 Newsletter
http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2019-newsletter
<b>The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for the month of March 2019.</b>
<h3><span>Highlights for March 2019</span></h3>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>The Indian Patent Office (IPO) on 1 March 2019, published a draft of the “Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure, Version 3.0”. CIS </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-and-suggestions-to-the-draft-patent-manual-march-2019">provided comments</a><span> on patenting of computer related inventions.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team has </span><a href="https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2018-2019_round_2/The_Centre_for_Internet_and_Society/Proposal_form">submitted its proposal for the year 2019-2020</a><span> to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS-A2K has proposed to undertake content enrichment, skill development initiatives, cement partnership with existing partners and build relationships with new ones, and activities like Train-the-Trainer, Wikisource Conference, Wikimedia Summit India, Intensive Personal Wiki Training, supporting Indic Wikimedians through request page, etc.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organisation working on rejuvenation of rivers in India, has began documentation of rivers on Wiki, especially to draw attention to and mitigate the crisis of toxic deposits facing more than 40 rivers in India. The work was started by Jal Biradari, TBS’s Maharashtra based group, in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team of CIS. </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-rejuvenating-indias-rivers-the-wiki-way">A report from the first pilot workshop</a><span> conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, in Alwar, Rajasthan has been published.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. Saumyaa Naidu </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement">in a report has shared the learnings</a><span>from the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok co-authored a policy brief titled <a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/improving-the-processes-for-disclosing-security-vulnerabilities-to-government-entities-in-india">Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India</a><span>. The policy brief has recommended changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding external vulnerability reporting and disclosure.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla co-authored a White Paper titled 'The Localisation Gambit'. The paper was edited by Pranav M.B., Vipul Kharbanda and Amber Sinha. Anjanaa Aravindan provided research assistance. Government of India has drafted multiple policy instruments which dictate that certain types of data must be stored in servers located physically within the territory of India. The </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-localisation-gambit-unpacking-policy-moves-for-the-sovereign-control-of-data-in-india">White Paper serves as a resource for stakeholders</a><span> attempting to intervene in this debate and arrive at a workable solution where the objectives of data localisation are met through measures that have the least negative impact on India’s economic, political, and legal interests.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>The Technology Law Forum at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) has published the Report on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium.This report is a compilation of all the speakers' speeches during the panel discussion. Shweta Mohandas was one of the eight speakers at the panel and the excerpts from her presentation has also been covered </span><a href="https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3356776">in this report</a><span>.</span></li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><span>CIS in its r@w blog featured an essay titled</span><a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/users-and-the-internet-bcd763ac474"> 'Users and the Internet'</a><span> by Purbasha Auddy, part of a series on </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india">Studying Internet in India (2015)</a><span>; and audio recording of a session titled </span><a href="https://medium.com/rawblog/selfiesfromthefield-61e18a7154ba">#SelfiesFromtheField </a><span>which was part of the </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17">Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.</a></li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>Jobs</h3>
<p>CIS is hiring:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/cis-a2k-finance-officer-call-for-application">CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application</a> (Only women candidates).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/jobs/internship">Internship</a><span> - applications accepted throughout the year.</span></li>
</ul>
<h3></h3>
<h3>CIS and the News</h3>
<p>The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-shyam-ponappa-march-7-2019-recapturing-the-commons">Recapturing the Commons</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 7, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward">Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward</a> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 10, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down">Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down</a><span> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 24, 2019).</span></li>
</ul>
<div></div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3><br />CIS in the News</h3>
<p>CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-rahul-sachitanand-march-3-2019-why-entrepreneurs-are-wary-of-new-draft-e-commerce-policy">Why entrepreneurs are wary of the new draft e-commerce policy</a> (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; March 3, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/internet/website-not-found-pop-ups-leave-net-activists-fuming/articleshow/68279112.cms">'Website not found' pop-ups leave net activists fuming</a> (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; March 6, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/more-urban-indian-women-are-acting-against-offensive-calls-and-text-messages">More urban Indian women are acting against offensive calls and text messages</a> (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 8, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/aria-thaker-quartz-india-march-12-2019-twitter-unlike-facebook-barely-carries-political-ads-in-india">Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a ghost town for political ads in India so far</a> (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 12, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/handelsblatt-frederic-spohr-march-13-2019-wahlkampf-beeinflussung-wie-die-chinesische-mega-app-tiktok-indiens-wahlkampf-beeinflussen-koennte">Wie die chinesische Mega-App TikTok Indiens Wahlkampf beeinflussen könnte</a> (Handelsblatt; March 13, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-kv-aditya-bharadwaj-march-15-2019-when-laugh-lines-turn-worry-lines">When laugh lines turn worry lines</a> (K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj; Hindu; March 15, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/medianama-march-18-2019-zaheer-merchant-proposed-intermediary-liability-rules-threat-privacy-and-free-speech">Proposed Intermediary Liability Rules threat to privacy and free speech, global coalition tells MeitY</a> (Zaheer Merchant; Medianama; March 18, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/times-of-india-march-31-2019-ketaki-desai-now-police-use-apps-to-catch-a-criminal">Now, police use apps to catch a criminal</a> (Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma; Times of India; March 31, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<div></div>
<ul>
</ul>
<div></div>
<h2><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Copyright and Patent</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. We prepared the India report for the Consumers International IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty, questioned the demonisation of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.</span></p>
<p><strong>Submission</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/comments-and-suggestions-to-the-draft-patent-manual-march-2019">Comments and Suggestions to the Draft Patent Manual March 2019</a> (Achal Prabhala, Feroz Ali, Ramya Sheshadri, Roshan John and Anubha Sinha; March 21, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Wikipdedia</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/train-the-trainer-program-2018">Train the Trainer program 2018</a> (Sailesh Patnaik; March 6, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/the-city-of-bhubaneswar-is-going-open">The city of Bhubaneswar is going Open</a> (Sailesh Patnaik; March 7, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/subodh-kulkarni-rejuvenating-indias-rivers-the-wiki-way">Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way</a> (Subodh Kulkarni; March 7, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/c95ca8ccdca8ca1-cb5cbfc95cbfcaaca1cbfcaf-cb6cbfc95ccdcb7ca3-cafc9cca8cc6-cb8caecbecb5cb6-caeca4ccdca4cc1-ca4cb0cacca4cbfcaf-cb5cb0ca6cbf">ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಶಿಕ್ಷಣ ಯೋಜನೆ ಸಮಾವೇಶ ಮತ್ತು ತರಬೇತಿಯ ವರದಿ</a> (Ananth Subray; March 7, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/saumyaa-naidu-design-and-the-open-knowledge-movement">Design and the Open Knowledge Movement</a> (Saumyaa Naidu; March 31, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Event Organized</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/a2k/events/wikimedia-summit-india-2019">Wikimedia Summit India 2019</a> (Organized by CIS-A2K; New Delhi; March 16 - 17, 2019). CIS-A2K team organized a two-day Wikimedia Summit event for the participants taking part in the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Openness</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Event Organized</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/openness/events/talks-by-richard-abisla-and-kaliya-young">Talks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young</a> (Organized by CIS; Bangalore; March 4, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<h2><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify; ">Cyber Security</h3>
<p><strong>Research Paper</strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/improving-the-processes-for-disclosing-security-vulnerabilities-to-government-entities-in-india">Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India</a> (Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok; March 20, 2019). <span>This is an update to our previously released paper titled "Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India". The full document can be accessed </span><a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/Improving%20the%20Processes%20for%20Disclosing%20Security%20Vulnerabilities%20to%20Government%20Entities%20in%20India.pdf">here</a><span>.</span></li>
</ul>
<div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>Privacy</h3>
<p><strong>Research Paper</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-localisation-gambit-unpacking-policy-moves-for-the-sovereign-control-of-data-in-india">The Localisation Gambit: Unpacking policy moves for the sovereign control of data in India</a> (Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla; March 19, 2019).</li>
</ul>
<div><strong>Participation in Events</strong></div>
<div>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/nullcon-security-conference">Nullcon Security Conference</a> (Organized by Nullcon; March 1 - 2, 2019; Goa). Karan Saini attended the event.</li>
<li><span><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/seminar-on-201cevolution-of-communication-social-media-beyond201d">Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond”</a> (Organized by TRAI; Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennaii; March 15, 2019).</span></li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/dsci-infosys-roundtable">DSCI-Infosys Roundtable</a> (Organized by Infosys; Bangalore; March 25, 2019). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.</li>
</ul>
<strong> </strong></div>
<ul>
</ul>
<h3>Free Speech and Expression</h3>
<p><strong>Event</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/internet-speech-perspectives-on-regulation-and-policy">Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy</a> (Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 5, 2019).</li>
</ul>
</div>
<p><strong>Participation in Event</strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/just-net-coalition-workshop-on-equity-and-social-justice-in-a-digital-world">Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World</a> (Organized by Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World and its partners; Bangkok; March 25 - 27, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in the event.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Artificial Intelligence, ICT and IoT</h3>
<p><strong>Participation in Events</strong></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/rfcs-we-love-transport-apps-edition">RFCs We Love: Transport & Apps Edition</a> (Organized by India Internet Engineering Society; March 2, 2019; Go-Jek; Domlur, Bangalore). Gurshabad Grover was a speaker at this event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/consultation-on-draft-e-commerce-policy">Consultation on Draft E-commerce Policy</a> (Organized by Alternative Law Forum and IT for Change; March 14, 2019; Tony Hall, Ashirwad , Off St.Marks Road; Bangalore). Arindrajit Basu attended the event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/international-conference-on-justice-education-legal-implications-of-artificial-intelligence">International Conference on Justice Education:Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence</a> (Organized by Nirma University; Ahmedabad; March 15 - 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu attended the conference. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/facebook-ai-for-india-summit">AI for India Summit</a> (Organized by Facebook; Leela Palace, Bengaluru; March 26, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/roundtable-on-consumer-experiences-with-new-technologies-in-apac-singapore">Roundtable on Consumer Experiences with New Technologies in APAC (Singapore)</a> (Organized by Consumers International; Google, Singapore; March 26, 2019). Arindrajit Basu participated in the event.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<div></div>
<h2><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work (RAW)</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><strong>Blog Entries</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/collectionandidentity-5a970b35f842">#CollectionAndIdentity </a>(Ravi Shukla, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Mrutyunjay Mishra; March 2, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar-11b4ba2a72e4">The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar</a> (Sailen Routray; March 2, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/effective-activism-the-internet-social-media-and-hierarchical-activism-in-new-delhi-894a47cdcdc3">Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi </a>(Sarah McKeever; March 12, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/campuscampaigns-user-perceptions-in-pre-digital-and-digital-eras-8bb2ffac4ac1">#CampusCampaigns: User Perceptions in Pre-digital and Digital Eras </a>(Arjun Ghosh; March 12, 2019).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://medium.com/rawblog/taking-open-science-offline-ec08ae7e0fae">Taking Open Science Offline</a> (Shreyashi Ray; March 21, 2019).<br />
<div></div>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Participation in Event</strong></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium">Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium</a> (Organized by Michigan State University; March 21 - 22, 2019). P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<hr />
<h2><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a></h2>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
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<ul>
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<p>► Support Us</p>
<div>Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</div>
<p>► Request for Collaboration</p>
<div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at <a>tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects</i>.</div>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2019-newsletter'>http://editors.cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2019-newsletter</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkInternet GovernanceAccess to Knowledge2019-07-18T02:14:11ZPageDigital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down
<b>The day when three social-media apps refused to load.</b>
<p>The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-turning-life-upside-down-5638488/">Indian Express</a> on March 24, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.<br /><br />Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.<br /><br />It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-04-03T01:19:29ZBlog EntryPresentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium
<b>P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives at the Global Digital Humanities Symposium organised by Michigan State University on March 21-22, 2019. </b>
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<h4>Puthiya Purayil Sneha (Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India)</h4>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The archive has been an important context for conversations around digital humanities (DH) in India, as it has been globally. The last few decades have seen several large-scale efforts in digitalization across various sectors, including state institutions (National Museum, National Cultural Audio-Visual Archive (IGNCA)) universities (Jadavpur University, Ambedkar University,) and individual and collaborative efforts (Indian Memory Project, Indiancine.ma ) to name a few. The emergence of new fields like DH, digital cultures and cultural analytics also indicate several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, on the one hand alluding to the potential offered by democratizing technologies, but also reflecting persistent challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The growth of new areas of study and creative practice like DH has brought about a renewed focus on the creation of digital corpora, and the need for new technologies and methods of research, more specifically through the development of digital pedagogies. The contexts of these questions are however much wider, located in long-spanning efforts in digitization and digital literacy more broadly, which are still fraught with challenges of access, usage and context. Even as the colonial imagination of state archives remains prevalent in India, digital archival initiatives facilitated by infrastructure such as open source content management systems and tools like web annotation have opened up spaces for alternate narratives. Drawing upon excerpts from a report on mapping the field of DH in India, and ongoing conversations on the digital transition in archival practices, this presentation seeks to understand the politics of digital archiving in a postcolonial context, and how it informs larger trajectories of digitalisation, and the growth of fields like DH in India today.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">For more info <a class="external-link" href="http://www.msuglobaldh.org/schedule/abstracts/">click here</a></p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/presentation-at-global-digital-humanities-symposium</a>
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No publishersneha-ppResearchers at Work2019-05-03T09:41:53ZNews ItemDigital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward
<b>The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.</b>
<p>The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/digital-native-monsters-unchained-5615666/">Indian Express</a> on March 10, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.<br /><br />It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-04-03T01:12:30ZBlog EntryWhat I learned from going offline for 48 hours
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours
<b>A weekend without the internet shows just how much control we surrender to online chatter. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was<a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/noises-off-5-5594362/"> published by Indian Express </a>on February 24, 2019.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important occasions that I had missed. Despite the fact that I had not produced any content, not initiated any conversations, and not engaged with any material, I had more than 400 notifications from five main social media apps, where people had tagged me, poked me and pulled me into long conversation threads that I could no longer recognise or trace back.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An equal number of friendly algorithms had curated things that needed my attention and were warning me that I might have missed out on the most life-changing moments. My personal messaging system was filled with group messages, those from family and friends who were not talking to me but making me a witness to their conversations. There were also a few frantic messages, first checking if the messages were being delivered, then wondering why I was not responding, and then going into a rage about my rudeness for not even informing them that I wouldn’t be replying to them.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important occasions that I had missed. Despite the fact that I had not produced any content, not initiated any conversations, and not engaged with any material, I had more than 400 notifications from five main social media apps, where people had tagged me, poked me and pulled me into long conversation threads that I could no longer recognise or trace back.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">An equal number of friendly algorithms had curated things that needed my attention and were warning me that I might have missed out on the most life-changing moments. My personal messaging system was filled with group messages, those from family and friends who were not talking to me but making me a witness to their conversations. There were also a few frantic messages, first checking if the messages were being delivered, then wondering why I was not responding, and then going into a rage about my rudeness for not even informing them that I wouldn’t be replying to them.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-03-14T16:21:29ZBlog EntryData Infrastructures and Inequities: Why Does Reproductive Health Surveillance in India Need Our Urgent Attention?
http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india
<b>In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices unveils the gendered power differentials wedded into taken-for-granted “benign” monitoring processes. The unpacking of the Mother and Child Tracking System and the National Health Stack reveals the neo-liberal aspirations of the Indian state. </b>
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<p><em>The article was first published by <a href="https://www.epw.in/engage/article/data-infrastructures-inequities-why-does-reproductive-health-surveillance-india-need-urgent-attention" target="_blank">EPW Engage, Vol. 54, Issue No. 6</a>, on 9 February 2019.</em></p>
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<h3><strong>Framing Reproductive Health as a Surveillance Question</strong></h3>
<p>The approach of the postcolonial Indian state to healthcare has been Malthusian, with the prioritisation of family planning and birth control (Hodges 2004). Supported by the notion of socio-economic development arising out of a “modernisation” paradigm, the target-based approach to achieving reduced fertility rates has shaped India’s reproductive and child health (RCH) programme (Simon-Kumar 2006).</p>
<p>This is also the context in which India’s abortion law, the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, was framed in 1971, placing the decisional privacy of women seeking abortions in the hands of registered medical practitioners. The framing of the MTP act invisibilises females seeking abortions for non-medical reasons within the legal framework. The exclusionary provisions only exacerbated existing gaps in health provisioning, as access to safe and legal abortions had already been curtailed by severe geographic inequalities in funding, infrastructure, and human resources. The state has concomitantly been unable to meet contraceptive needs of married couples or reduce maternal and infant mortality rates in large parts of the country, mediating access along the lines of class, social status, education, and age (Sanneving et al 2013).</p>
<p>While the official narrative around the RCH programme transitioned to focus on universal access to healthcare in the 1990s, the target-based approach continues to shape the reality on the ground. The provision of reproductive healthcare has been deeply unequal and, in some cases, in hospitals. These targets have been known to be met through the practice of forced, and often unsafe, sterilisation, in conditions of absence of adequate provisions or trained professionals, pre-sterilisation counselling, or alternative forms of contraception (Sama and PLD 2018). Further, patients have regularly been provided cash incentives, foreclosing the notion of free consent, especially given that the target population of these camps has been women from marginalised economic classes in rural India.</p>
<p>Placing surveillance studies within a feminist praxis allows us to frame the reproductive health landscape as more than just an ill-conceived, benign monitoring structure. The critical lens becomes useful for highlighting that taken-for-granted structures of monitoring are wedded with power differentials: genetic screening in fertility clinics, identification documents such as birth certificates, and full-body screeners are just some of the manifestations of this (Adrejevic 2015). Emerging conversations around feminist surveillance studies highlight that these data systems are neither benign nor free of gendered implications (Andrejevic 2015). In continual remaking of the social, corporeal body as a data actor in society, such practices render some bodies normative and obfuscate others, based on categorisations put in place by the surveiller.</p>
<p>In fact, the history of surveillance can be traced back to the colonial state where it took the form of systematic sexual and gendered violence enacted upon indigenous populations in order to render them compliant (Rifkin 2011; Morgensen 2011). Surveillance, then, manifests as a “scientific” rationalisation of complex social hieroglyphs (such as reproductive health) into formats enabling administrative interventions by the modern state. Lyon (2001) has also emphasised how the body emerged as the site of surveillance in order for the disciplining of the “irrational, sensual body”—essential to the functioning of the modern nation-state—to effectively happen.</p>
<h3><strong>Questioning the Information and Communications Technology for Development (ICT4D) and Big Data for Development (BD4D) Rhetoric</strong></h3>
<p>Information and Communications Technology (ICT) and data-driven approaches to the development of a robust health information system, and by extension, welfare, have been offered as solutions to these inequities and exclusions in access to maternal and reproductive healthcare in the country.</p>
<p>The move towards data-driven development in the country commenced with the introduction of the Health Management Information System in Andhra Pradesh in 2008, and the Mother and Child Tracking System (MCTS) nationally in 2011. These are reproductive health information systems (HIS) that collect granular data about each pregnancy from the antenatal to the post-natal period, at the level of each sub-centre as well as primary and community health centre. The introduction of HIS comprised cross-sectoral digitisation measures that were a part of the larger national push towards e-governance; along with health, thirty other distinct areas of governance, from land records to banking to employment, were identified for this move towards the digitalised provisioning of services (MeitY 2015).</p>
<p>The HIS have been seen as playing a critical role in the ecosystem of health service provision globally. HIS-based interventions in reproductive health programming have been envisioned as a means of: (i) improving access to services in the context of a healthcare system ridden with inequalities; (ii) improving the quality of services provided, and (iii) producing better quality data to facilitate the objectives of India’s RCH programme, including family planning and population control. Accordingly, starting 2018, the MCTS is being replaced by the RCH portal in a phased manner. The RCH portal, in areas where the ANMOL (ANM Online) application has been introduced, captures data real-time through tablets provided to health workers (MoHFW 2015).</p>
<p>A proposal to mandatorily link the Aadhaar with data on pregnancies and abortions through the MCTS/RCH has been made by the union minister for Women and Child Development as a deterrent to gender-biased sex selection (Tembhekar 2016). The proposal stems from the prohibition of gender-biased sex selection provided under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994. The approach taken so far under the PCPNDT Act, 2014 has been to regulate the use of technologies involved in sex determination. However, the steady decline in the national sex ratio since the passage of the PCPNDT Act provides a clear indication that the regulation of such technology has been largely ineffective. A national policy linking Aadhaar with abortions would be aimed at discouraging gender-biased sex selection through state surveillance, in direct violation of a female’s right to decisional privacy with regards to their own body.</p>
<p>Linking Aadhaar would also be used as a mechanism to enable direct benefit transfer (DBT) to the beneficiaries of the national maternal benefits scheme. Linking reproductive health services to the Aadhaar ecosystem has been critiqued because it is exclusionary towards women with legitimate claims towards abortions and other reproductive services and benefits, and it heightens the risk of data breaches in a cultural fabric that already stigmatises abortions. The bodies on which this stigma is disproportionately placed, unmarried or disabled females, for instance, experience the harms of visibility through centralised surveillance mechanisms more acutely than others by being penalised for their deviance from cultural expectations. This is in accordance with the theory of "data extremes,” wherein marginalised communities are seen as living on the extremes of data capture, leading to a data regime that either refuses to recognise them as legitimate entities or subjects them to overpolicing in order to discipline deviance (Arora 2016). In both developed and developing contexts, the broader purpose of identity management has largely been to demarcate legitimate and illegitimate actors within a population, either within the framework of security or welfare.</p>
<h3><strong>Potential Harms of the Data Model of Reproductive Health Provisioning</strong></h3>
<p>Informational privacy and decisional privacy are critically shaped by data flows and security within the MCTS/RCH. No standards for data sharing and storage, or anonymisation and encryption of data have been implemented despite role-based authentication (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011). The risks of this architectural design are further amplified in the context of the RCH/ANMOL where data is captured real-time. In the absence of adequate safeguards against data leaks, real-time data capture risks the publicising of reproductive health choices in an already stigmatised environment. This opens up avenues for further dilution of autonomy in making future reproductive health choices.</p>
<p>Several core principles of informational privacy, such as limitations regarding data collection and usage, or informed consent, also need to be reworked within this context.<sup>[1]</sup> For instance, the centrality of the requirement of “free, informed consent” by an individual would need to be replaced by other models, especially in the context of reproductive health of rape survivors who are vulnerable and therefore unable to exercise full agency. The ability to make a free and informed choice, already dismantled in the context of contemporary data regimes, gets further precluded in such contexts. The constraints on privacy in decisions regarding the body are then replicated in the domain of reproductive data collection.</p>
<p>What is uniform across these digitisation initiatives is their treatment of maternal and reproductive health as solely a medical event, framed as a data scarcity problem. In doing so, they tend to amplify the understanding of reproductive health through measurable indicators that ignore social determinants of health. For instance, several studies conducted in the rural Indian context have shown that the degree of women’s autonomy influences the degree of usage of pregnancy care, and that the uptake of pregnancy care was associated with village-level indicators such as economic development, provisioning of basic infrastructure and social cohesion. These contextual factors get overridden in pervasive surveillance systems that treat reproductive healthcare as comprising only of measurable indicators and behaviours, that are dependent on individual behaviour of practitioners and women themselves, rather than structural gaps within the system.</p>
<p>While traditionally associated with state governance, the contemporary surveillance regime is experienced as distinct from its earlier forms due to its reliance on a nexus between surveillance by the state and private institutions and actors, with both legal frameworks and material apparatuses for data collection and sharing (Shepherd 2017). As with historical forms of surveillance, the harms of contemporary data regimes accrue disproportionately among already marginalised and dissenting communities and individuals. Data-driven surveillance has been critiqued for its excesses in multiple contexts globally, including in the domains of predictive policing, health management, and targeted advertising (Mason 2015). In the attempts to achieve these objectives, surveillance systems have been criticised for their reliance on replicating past patterns, reifying proximity to a hetero-patriarchal norm (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Under data-driven surveillance systems, this proximity informs the preexisting boxes of identity for which algorithmic representations of the individual are formed. The boxes are defined contingent on the distinct objectives of the particular surveillance project, collating disparate pieces of data flows and resulting in the recasting of the singular offline self into various 'data doubles' (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Refractive, rather than reflective, the data doubles have implications for the physical, embodied life of individual with an increasing number of service provisioning relying on the data doubles (Lyon 2001). Consider, for instance, apps on menstruation, fertility, and health, and wearables such as fitness trackers and pacers, that support corporate agendas around what a woman’s healthy body should look, be or behave like (Lupton 2014). Once viewed through the lens of power relations, the fetishised, apolitical notion of the data “revolution” gives way to what we may better understand as “dataveillance.”</p>
<h3><strong>Towards a Networked State and a Neo-liberal Citizen</strong></h3>
<p>Following in this tradition of ICT being treated as the solution to problems plaguing India’s public health information system, a larger, all-pervasive healthcare ecosystem is now being proposed by the Indian state (NITI Aayog 2018). Termed the National Health Stack, it seeks to create a centralised electronic repository of health records of Indian citizens with the aim of capturing every instance of healthcare service usage. Among other functions, it also envisions a platform for the provisioning of health and wellness-based services that may be dispensed by public or private actors in an attempt to achieve universal health coverage. By allowing private parties to utilise the data collected through pullable open application program interfaces (APIs), it also fits within the larger framework of the National Health Policy 2017 that envisions the private sector playing a significant role in the provision of healthcare in India. It also then fits within the state–private sector nexus that characterises dataveillance. This, in turn, follows broader trends towards market-driven solutions and private financing of health sector reform measures that have already had profound consequences on the political economy of healthcare worldwide (Joe et al 2018).</p>
<p>These initiatives are, in many ways, emblematic of the growing adoption of network governance reform by the Indian state (Newman 2001). This is a stark shift from its traditional posturing as the hegemonic sovereign nation state. This shift entails the delayering from large, hierarchical and unitary government systems to horizontally arranged, more flexible, relatively dispersed systems.<sup>[2]</sup> The former govern through the power of rules and law, while the latter take the shape of self-regulating networks such as public–private contractual arrangements (Snellen 2005). ICTs have been posited as an effective tool in enabling the transition to network governance by enhancing local governance and interactive policymaking enabling the co-production of knowledge (Ferlie et al 2011). The development of these capabilities is also critical to addressing “wicked problems” such as healthcare (Rittel and Webber 1973).<sup>[3]</sup> The application of the techno-deterministic, data-driven model to reproductive healthcare provision, then, resembles a fetishised approach to technological change. The NHSRC describes this as the collection of data without an objective, leading to a disproportional burden on data collection over use (NHSRC and Taurus Glocal 2011).</p>
<p>The blurring of the functions of state and private actors is reflective of the neo-liberal ethic, which produces new practices of governmentality. Within the neo-liberal framework of reproductive healthcare, the citizen is constructed as an individual actor, with agency over and responsibility for their own health and well-being (Maturo et al 2016).</p>
<h3><strong>“Quantified Self” of the Neo-liberal Citizen</strong></h3>
<p>Nowhere can the manifestation of this neo-liberal citizen can be seen as clearly as in the “quantified self” movement. The quantified self movement refers to the emergence of a whole range of apps that enable the user to track bodily functions and record data to achieve wellness and health goals, including menstruation, fertility, pregnancies, and health indicators in the mother and baby. Lupton (2015) labels this as the emergence of the “digitised reproductive citizen,” who is expected to be attentive to her fertility and sexual behaviour to achieve better reproductive health goals. The practice of collecting data around reproductive health is not new to the individual or the state, as has been demonstrated by the discussion above. What is new in this regime of datafication under the self-tracking movement is the monetisation of reproductive health data by private actors, the labour for which is performed by the user. Focusing on embodiment draws attention to different kinds of exploitation engendered by reproductive health apps. Not only is data about the body collected and sold, the unpaid labour for collection is extracted from the user. The reproductive body can then be understood as a cyborg, or a woman-machine hybrid, systematically digitising its bodily functions for profit-making within the capitalist (re)production machine (Fotoloulou 2016). Accordingly, all major reproductive health tracking apps have a business model that relies on selling information about users for direct marketing of products around reproductive health and well-being (Felizi and Varon nd).</p>
<p>As has been pointed out in the case of big data more broadly, reproductive health applications (apps) facilitate the visibility of the female reproductive body in the public domain. Supplying anonymised data sets to medical researchers and universities fills some of the historical gaps in research around the female body and reproductive health. Reproductive and sexual health tracking apps globally provide their users a platform to engage with biomedical information around sexual and reproductive health. Through group chats on the platform, they are also able to engage with experiential knowledge of sexual and reproductive health. This could also help form transnational networks of solidarity around the body and health (Fotopoulou 2016).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This radical potential of network-building around reproductive and sexual health is, however, tempered to a large extent by the reconfiguration of gendered stereotypes through these apps. In a study on reproductive health apps on Google Play Store, Lupton (2014) finds that products targeted towards female users are marketed through the discourse of risk and vulnerability, while those targeted towards male users are framed within that of virility. Apart from reiterating gendered stereotypes around the male and female body, such a discourse assumes that the entire labour of family planning is performed by females. This same is the case with the MCTS/RCH.</p>
<p>Technological interventions such as reproductive health apps as well as HIS are based on the assumption that females have perfect control over decisions regarding their own bodies and reproductive health, despite this being disproved in India. The Guttmacher Institute (2014) has found that 60% of women in India report not having control over decisions regarding their own healthcare. The failure to account for the husband or the family as stakeholder in decision-making around reproductive health has been a historical failure of the family planning programme in India, and is now being replicated in other modalities. This notion of an autonomous citizen who is able to take responsibility of their own reproductive health and well-being does not hold true in the Indian context. It can even be seen as marginalising females who have already been excluded from the reproductive health system, as they are held responsible for their own inability to access healthcare.</p>
<h3><strong>Concluding Remarks</strong></h3>
<p>The interplay that emerges between reproductive health surveillance and data infrastructures is a complex one. It requires the careful positioning of the political nature of data collection and processing as well as its hetero-patriarchal and colonial legacies, within the need for effective utilisation of data for achieving developmental goals. Assessing this discourse through a feminist lens identifies the web of power relations in data regimes. This problematises narratives of technological solutions for welfare provision.</p>
<p>The reproductive healthcare framework in India then offers up a useful case study to assess these concerns. The growing adoption of ICT-based surveillance tools to equalise access to healthcare needs to be understood in the socio-economic, legal, and cultural context where these tools are being implemented. Increased surveillance has historically been associated with causing the structural gendered violence that it is now being offered as a solution to. This is a function of normative standards being constructed for reproductive behaviour that necessarily leave out broader definitions of reproductive health and welfare when viewed through a feminist lens. Within the larger context of health policymaking in India, moves towards privatisation then demonstrate the peculiarity of dataveillance as it functions through an unaccountable and pervasive overlapping of state and private surveillance practises. It remains to be seen how these trends in ICT-driven health policies affect access to reproductive rights and decisional privacy for millions of females in India and other parts of the global South.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india'>http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/data-infrastructures-inequities-reproductive-health-surveillance-india</a>
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No publisherAayush Rathi and Ambika TandonBig DataData SystemsPrivacyResearchers at WorkInternet GovernanceResearchBD4DHealthcareSurveillanceBig Data for Development2019-12-30T16:44:32ZBlog EntryIndia’s proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese laws
http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-january-27-2019-indias-proposed-new-internet-bill-is-as-repressive-as-the-worst-of-chinese-laws
<b>The proposed new internet bill is as repressive as the worst of Chinese restrictions. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unquestioningly expand the remit of the government.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was published in <a class="external-link" href="https://indianexpress.com/article/express-sunday-eye/the-egg-vanishes-5555253/">Indian Express</a> on January 27, 2019,</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">Almost a decade ago, I spent a year living in Shanghai, as part of a research fellowship. I spent time with digital cultural producers and wrote about the ways in which they navigated the restrictive terrains of the web. One of the groups that I was working with, introduced me to a stuffed toy called Cao Ni Ma which, spoken one way means, “mud grass horse”. But the same words with a different tone resulted into an offensive mother-related expletive. The Cao Ni Ma, that year, was the best-selling toy in the Chinese market during the new year celebrations, and had broken the internet with memes, videos, and imaginary pictures that emerged once it was conceived in a prank encyclopedia page titled the “10 legendary obscene beasts of China”. The humour was juvenile to my eyes, reminiscent of dorm-room talk as well as old internet discussion forums where tech nerds came with the keyword Pr0n or Prawn to escape the prying eyes of primitive censorship algorithms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as I quickly learned, this was not just fun and games. The reason why this entire thing had gone viral was because China had, by then, established a complete control over what can and cannot be said online. Chinese internet intermediaries — like Baidu, which run the Chinese version of Wikipedia, for instance — had not only complied but also internalised the censoring of all speech that was found offensive to the sovereignty and integrity of the country. This included critique of the state and political leaders, a voicing of complaint about poor infrastructure or governance, any expression of desire or profanity that would be socially unacceptable. Intermediaries in China, even before the social credit systems were announced, were mandated and enabled to remove all content that they thought might “shatter the harmony” of the “Chinese way of living”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I didn’t realise how deep this regulation of the intermediaries goes till I accidentally ended up writing about Cao Ni Ma, and the playfulness of their subversion on my research blog. It was, in fact, in an academic paper that I presented at a conference in Taiwan and so I had announced it on my social media. While I was in Taiwan, my email suddenly started singing. My host colleagues were concerned about my well-being. My departmental colleagues were asking me about my whereabouts. The dean of the faculty asked me to stay back in Taiwan longer and to not come back to Shanghai till I heard from him again. It took me six more days before I was finally reunited with my guest house, and all my stuff. Upon return, I had friendly visits from five different committees, ranging from academic ethics panel that had approved my research project to the immigration and police who wanted to know more about my research.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Once the ordeal was over — though I was warned that another infringement would not be tolerated — I kept on re-reading what I had written to figure out what could have triggered this amount of anxiety. When I asked a Chinese friend, she looked at me with telling eyes. “It is not what you have written but the fact that you have written about it as well. You can’t write about this because it undermines the government”. The regulation of intermediaries was not about making the internet safe, keeping hate speech at bay, and building a more inclusive web. It was purely and simply about determining who can say what about what. There were no clear guidelines because anything that could be interpreted as unwanted automatically became unwanted.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The current Indian government has proposed a new internet bill that seeks to mimic the Chinese control of information and voices to the T. The new intermediaries liability and content monitoring act that will become a law in February, unless resisted and critiqued, unquestioningly expands the remit of the government, through private intermediaries, to control what we can see and read, and also what we can say and share. It is yet another assault in an atmosphere where newspapers, civil society organisations, political protestors, and common persons are targeted, bullied, and intimidated into silence.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Without public support and attention, this law is most likely going to pass. I am making a list of all the things we might no longer be able to say on the web — and also obsessively looking at the Instagram egg while I still can, because just like the midday meal, the egg might soon disappear from our vegetarian webs.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-january-27-2019-indias-proposed-new-internet-bill-is-as-repressive-as-the-worst-of-chinese-laws'>http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-january-27-2019-indias-proposed-new-internet-bill-is-as-repressive-as-the-worst-of-chinese-laws</a>
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No publishernishantResearchers at Work2019-02-04T02:05:12ZBlog Entry