Centre for Internet and Society

Poesis in the Information Age: Language and its Limit[ation]s

praskrishna — 2015-01-26T13:57:34Z

Alec Schachner, an independent scholar, translator, multi-genre musician and sound artist will give a talk on the limits/limitations of languages at the Centre for Internet & Society's office on January 30, 2015 at 5 p.m.

The Talk

An examination of the limits/limitations of language(s) through the lens of contemporary Vietnamese poetics and print culture, aiming to open a deeper dialogue on the nature of self/state expression and censorship in the age of internet connectivity.

Alec Schachner

Alec graduated from Columbia College with a degree in Sociocultural Anthropology, English & Comparative Literature, Creative Writing and Music Theory/Composition. Alec currently resides in Vietnam, where he has served as lecturer on literature for 5 years with the Faculty of English Linguistics and Literature at the Vietnam National University of Social Sciences and Humanities HCMC. He is working on English translations of several anthologies of Vietnamese poetry, one of which - the purification festival in April - just went to print across VN earlier this month. He is also pursuing research into contemporary Saigonese print culture and the social/cyber mileus surrounding literary circles/movements in the post-Socialist cultural sphere.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/events/poesis-in-the-information-age

Podcast of Nishant Shah's Interview by the BBC

praskrishna — 2012-01-28T15:07:41Z

Nishant Shah was interviewed by BBC.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/podcast-bbc

Podcast of Digital Natives

praskrishna — 2012-02-15T11:35:50Z

Listen to the podcast of digital natives here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/podcast-of-digital-natives

PMO’s no to smart cards, insists on Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2016-04-20T02:19:18Z

The government has decided to stop issuing new smart cards to beneficiaries of government schemes as Aadhaar is now backed by a law.

The article by Somesh Jha was published in the Hindu on April 10, 2016. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) has issued strict instructions to the Information Technology Ministry to ensure that States and the Central governmentstop issuing smart cards for new programmes for beneficiaries, and to rely on the Aadhaar-based Direct Benefit Transfer platform instead.

The move will impact ministries such as Labour, Social Justice and Health, which are in the process or have already rolled out smart cards.

The government had said earlier that over 100 crore people, constituting 93 per cent of the adult population, had a unique identification (UID) number under the Aadhaar platform.

“The undersigned is directed to request the department to examine the need for state and central government departments to issue separate smart cards in the light of the near universal coverage of Aadhaar and the delivery of the most public welfare benefits through Aadhaar enabled platforms,” according to a directive issued by Gulzar N, Director, PMO, to Aruna Sharma, Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology.

“The undersigned is also directed to request the department to prepare policy on the delivery of various public services using Aadhaar, Jan Dhan Yojana and existing platforms without the issuance of new smart cards.”

Last month, Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Thaawar Chand Gehlot had announced that all differently abled persons would soon get a unique identity card to avail welfare schemes. .

State governments had also planned to use smart card technology for welfare schemes. For instance, Odisha was mulling smart cards for construction workers in the State.

The PMO sent a separate communiqué to Labour Secretary Shankar Aggarwal in the context of a proposal to issue 40 crore smart cards to informal sector workers, called the Unorganised Workers’ Identification Number (U-WIN). The UWIN cards were to be used by these workers to access benefits under schemes such as Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana , Aam Aadmi Bima Yojana , Atal Pension Yojana, Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana and Jeevan Jyoti Bima Yojana.

The PMO rejected the proposal noting that Aadhaar would act as a “universal unique identifier for each citizen.”

“Adding a UWIN number would not only duplicate work, but also introduce further problems in linking up with other databases which have already been linked with Aadhaar,” said the missive reviewed by The Hindu.

However, experts are sceptical of the government’s move.

“Smart cards are always better than biometrics. If that was not the case, the global financial infrastructure today will be working on biometrics and not on smart cards,” said Sunil Abraham, executive director of The Centre for Internet and Society.

“Why are these banks working on smart cards? Smart cards work using cryptography, which is more fool-proof than biometrics. Biometrics allow for remote, covert and non-consensual identification,” Mr. Abraham said.

Smart card vendors, however, said the move may not impact their market. “The demand for smart cards is massive in all the other segments such as for use in debit and credit cards or driving licenses and vehicle registration numbers,” said Deven Mehta, managing director of the Mumbai-based Smart Card IT Solutions.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-hindu-april-10-2016-somesh-jha-pmo-no-to-smart-cards-insists-aadhaar

Plug data leak before imposing Aadhaar

praskrishna — 2017-05-17T02:10:37Z

As the Central government continues to expand the scope and boundaries of the applicability of Aadhaar, the unique identification number, even before the Supreme Court’s verdict on its constitutional validity, reports suggesting that millions of Aadhaar numbers may have been leaked deliberately or inadvertently are a matter of grave concern.

The article was published in the Deccan Herald on May 11, 2017.

The Centre for Internet and Society, a Bengaluru-based organisation, has claimed that close to 135 million Aadhaar numbers and 100 million bank account numbers have been exposed by government portals dealing with pension, social welfare and employment guarantee schemes. The report says that with Aadhaar being used or planned to be used for authenticating and authorising several transactions, the financial risks of the disclosure of such data are greatly exacerbated. Virtually confirming that some ‘over-enthusiastic’ government agencies have been making the Aadhaar data public, Aruna Sundararajan, secretary, Union Electronics and Information Technology Ministry, has said that the Centre is in the process of ‘educating officials’ about the sanctity of the material collected, besides drafting amendments to the Information Technology Act to ensure data protection and secrecy. That’s indeed a late realisation, and hopefully, not a case of locking the stables once the horses have bolted.

The Supreme Court is also rightly concerned about the invasion of a citizen’s body in obtaining fingerprints and iris impressions for Aadhaar and the violation of an individual’s privacy. Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi raised several eyebrows by arguing that “citizens don’t have an absolute right over their own bodies” and there was nothing illegal about obtaining biometric details. He may be legally right, but as the court pointed out, it is the duty of the state to maintain the liberty and dignity of all individuals. As almost 98% of the population has already been covered by Aadhaar, the question of privacy is now more academic, though making Aadhaar mandatory for the filing of income tax along with PAN card is not. As the government is unable to come to grips with millions of benami transactions and largescale evasion of income tax in the country, if the linking of Aadhaar is going to bring down such cases, it needs to be welcomed.

However, Aadhaar is not a magic bullet that has a solution for every problem. The government shoulddrop the idea of making it mandatory for social welfare programmes such as children availing midday mealsin schools, supply of nutrition under ICDS programme and provision of scholarship for the disabled. The government certainly has a responsibility to prevent misuse of the schemes, while making sure that welfare measures are not denied to the needy on technical grounds.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/deccan-herald-may-11-2017-plug-data-leak-before-imposing-aadhaar

Pleasure and Pornography

praskrishna — 2010-12-21T11:07:31Z

pdf

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/pornography

Playsurface

praskrishna — 2012-05-23T08:47:38Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/home-images/Playsurface.jpg

Play Station

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T10:36:14Z

Parents needn’t panic, the internet can also be a haven for kids.

I recently came across a report about a village in Haryana which banned single women from using cellphones because the instrument in question has apparently led to couples getting together and eloping. That goes perfectly with what I’m discussing this week — the perception that the internet is the realm of the dirty, the desired and the forbidden.

Just last week, I heard three different people lamenting that children are addicted to technology, that technology corrupts our youth, and that technology is responsible for the decline of social values in the country. We need to address this paranoia about technology irrevocably transforming our world for better or worse. Particularly at this juncture, when this perception informs policies, regulation and governance about young people and their access to the internet.

My youngest correspondent in the Digital Natives programme —let’s call him M as he prefers not to be named — is in Class VI. He lives in Bangalore and runs an online community for other children at school to talk about growing up. A closed community on Facebook, it protects the privacy and identity of the participants, has a moderated access policy, and is a safe haven for children to talk about different issues, ranging from studies to the social dynamics of the schoolyard. M has been running this community for over a year now and while I do not have access to it (being a rank outsider and falling on the wrong side of the age-line), I understand from him and his friends that it has become the “coolest hangout” for almost everybody in the school, where they share, in safety, the aches and pains of teenage life.

A teacher at the school recently heard about the community and was outraged that an unmonitored, unauthorised space for free-for-all discussions was being controlled by “mere kids” and demanded that the community be shut down. With the power vested in her by the academic system, she pulled enough strings, called enough parents, and forced M and the other moderators to forfeit their passwords and shut down the community, including the archive of discussions and conversations that had grown in the last year. The parents and authorities were worried, M informs me, that “children would do all kinds of wrong things” if left to themselves. His teacher, who’s never really been on Facebook, and has vague notions about the internet, sternly announced: “The internet is a dangerous place, you can’t run it!”

M and his friends were enraged but powerless, dependent as they were on school and parental authorities for their access to online resources. Their community is no longer available on Facebook. They have been deprived of a virtual haven in which they could have discussions without feeling vulnerable. In a high-pressure academic environment, otherwise fraught with competition and rigid rules that stymie social interaction, it was the only real place for peer-to-peer bonding, and it’s now lost to them.

This story is not very dissimilar from many other instances that young users of technology often report, where their intentions and ambitions are not viewed as serious, and where elders look at their interaction with suspicion and intrigue. Parents, teachers and policy-makers presume that digital and internet technologies do bad things to children, and for them, it is time to wake up and smell the code. Technologies aren’t innately good or bad. When you hit yourself in the hand, you don’t blame the hammer. Technologies offer tools to perform different actions. For these digital natives, it’s a tool which provides public spaces for interaction, discussion and mobilisation. For many who live in urban environments and have regimented schedules of academic productivity, the bubbles on the internet are becoming the only viable alternative outlets for expression. The next time you want to apportion blame, try to look at the real problem, rather than conveniently blame it on technologies.

Technologies are what we make of them, and the paranoid urge to curb and control them denies young users their spaces of belonging and forces them to reach out through non-transparent ways. “The community shall find its way back. We were not doing anything wrong,” M’s best friend tells me. And M grins, slightly wickedly, pointing at his friend, “The only harm I would have caused is if I had thrown my laptop at him and hit him in the eye. And I would never do that. I love my laptop.”

Read the original here

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/play-station

Platforms, Power, and Politics

praskrishna — 2021-07-19T13:00:02Z

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/raw/platforms-power-and-politics.pdf

Planning Commission, Census 2011 and India Post using social media to understand people's pulse better

praskrishna — 2011-09-21T08:07:43Z

Even as the Centre is drawing up guidelines to encourage government bodies to use social media, a handful of entities are showing how they can use Facebook, Twitter and more to connect with citizens better.

The Planning Commission, Census 2011, department of posts, and the ministry of external affairs have, over the past year, established a functional and active presence on social media: from inviting suggestions to answering questions, from creating awareness to initiating debates. "It is inevitable because the government should go where the people are," says Sunil Abraham, executive director at the Centre for Internet and Society, a policy research organisation.

For the past six months, Gopi Kumar Bulusu, the CEO of Sankhya Technologies, an IT products company in Visakhapatnam, has been a regular contributor on the plan panel's Facebook page for the upcoming 12th Plan. "It gives you an opportunity to talk economics and contribute based on the knowledge you have," says Bulusu, a serial blogger. Arun Maira, member, Planning Commission, says its Facebook page, set up in February, works as a sounding board for ideas that emerge from offline consultations held by its 160 working groups. "The reach of Facebook is immense but the richness of communication is not much," says Maira. "It gives you a sense of the crowd but you don't expect great nuggets of advice." Yet, the Commission intends to make this engagement an ongoing one. "We want to create a new way of planning that's not episodic," says Maira.

The article by Vikas Kumar was published in the Economic Times on September 20, 2011. The original story can be read here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/using-social-media-to-understand-peoples-pulse

Plan for open access to science research

praskrishna — 2014-07-25T07:07:15Z

The policy is open to comments from the public till July 25.

The article by Renuka Phadnis was published in the Hindu on July 22, 2014. T. Vishnu Vardhan gave his inputs.

Ever felt frustrated while reading a science research journal online, only to see the message “to continue reading, subscribe now”? That may soon change.

The Department of Science and Technology and the Department of Biotechnology (DBt) under the Ministry of Science and Technology have drafted a policy that says publicly-funded scientific work published in science journals must adhere to open access (OA) norms, enabling anyone to read online content on science research for free.

OA is an initiative of Open Archives Initiative (OAI), an organisation which works for greater reach and free access to online science research funded by public money.

T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, Access to Knowledge, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, which assisted DST in drawing up the draft policy, said that in the absence of OA norms, commercial publishers were making money with content generated by scientists who used public funds for research.

However, those sceptical of the DST initiative are asking whether availability on the Net is equivalent to “public domain”. Concerns have also been raised about the quality of content provided through OA, as honing raw research material into scholarly journals requires rigour that commands a cost. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy, Fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences, Hyderabad, said it was much more important to make reliable information available to the public, at a reasonable charge, because “the price of keeping it free has a cost”. The draft of the DBT-DST Open Access Policy is open to comments from the public till July 25.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-july-22-2014-renuka-phadnis-plan-for-open-access-to-science-research

Plagiarism is rampant in Indian food writing – but finally, bloggers have a way to fight it

praskrishna — 2017-07-06T15:53:46Z

“We have been cheated,” declared the headline of the blog post making the rounds of social media on April 25.

The blogpost by Chanpreet Khurana was published by Scroll.in on July 4, 2017. Sunil Abraham was quoted.

The post, written by Rajkumar Saxena, former head of Mumbai’s Institute of Hotel Management, alleged that passages from his 1997 book on Awadhi cuisine, Dastarkhwan-e-Awadh, had been plagiarised by Sunil Soni, a veteran chef, in his new book titled Jashn-e-Oudh: Romance of the Cuisine.

The blog’s text, like the headline, dripped with hurt and contempt: “Here is a case of… a learned, literate person who has no qualms about unhesitatingly lifting word-by-word the explanations, recipes etc. from [a] book authored by us and claiming it to be his original work…” Images from the two books were embedded to support the allegation. “We need to name and shame such so-called experts through social media. We seek your support…”

The support came almost immediately.

Celebrity chef Ranveer Brar, who had written the foreword for Soni’s book, announced on Facebook that he wanted the author to remove it. Outrage also erupted on the wall of Food Bloggers’ Hall of Shame, a closed Facebook group of 421 members dedicated to fighting plagiarism in food writing and photography in India. “How can people even think that they can get away with such a shameless act of plagiarising?” wrote Anushruti RK.

It was an organic reaction. By blogging about his grievance, Saxena had tapped into the one space that Indian food writers are increasingly using today to redress the alleged plagiarism in food writing – social media.

“As a community, we are now discovering an average of one or two plagiarist websites/aggregators every week,” said Rhea Mitra-Dalal, the administrator of the Food Bloggers’ Hall of Shame, which shares dos and don’ts with members to protect their work. “We’ve had several run-ins with celebrity chefs, big food brands, restaurants, and food businesses, especially on their social media pages, where we have found plagiarised images. Public outcry on those pages has usually worked and we have got the plagiarised content down, but these are episodic and the basic mind-set hasn’t changed: it is fine to plagiarise, just apologise and take it down when caught.”

Cease and desist

Saxena’s blog post was a last resort. He says he had first noticed the alleged plagiarism – “42 recipes, 24 explanatory notes and 12 chapter notes,” according to him – in Jashn-e-Oudh in January, and had informed his publisher HarperCollins India. HarperCollins responded by sending a cease-and-desist notice to Soni, copying his publisher Shubhi Publications, and set three demands: remove the offending material from Jashn-e-Oudh, acknowledge the copyright of the authors of Dastarkhwan-e-Awadh, and pay Rs 5 lakh.

Soni and Sanjay Arya of Shubhi Publications claim they never received this notice.

On April 10, Saxena says he got an email from HarperCollins telling him it will not be pursuing the matter further because “currently HCI has put on hold all litigations due to some business-related issues”. “The copyright is definitely in your favour,” declared the email. “You are free to litigate this matter and file a suit for injunction. As far as shaming the authors/publisher on social media is concerned, as a publisher, we cannot opine on that. It is your personal decision...”

So, a fortnight later, Saxena did just that: he took his complaint to the internet.

Around the same time, he and his co-author Sangeeta Bhatnagar sent a legal notice, through their lawyer, to Soni to cease and desist from further publication and distribution of Jashn-e-Oudh, and demanded Rs 15 lakh in compensation.

This time, they got a seven-page response from Soni’s lawyer.

While denying the accusation of plagiarism, the response from Soni’s lawyer said, “Your clients are liable to show their copyright in the alleged infringed work of our client as no copyright can be claimed in the traditional recipes and their preparation as same will be similar across the globe to get the same taste.” It added that no copyright can be claimed on the subject of Awadhi recipes since it is “a common topic and known and available to the general public at large. All the recipes mentioned in the alleged publication are known in the market”.

Soni also denied the allegation when contacted for comment by Scroll.in.

Looking West

The reply from Soni’s lawyer makes some sound legal points, all of which, according to food bloggers, are reasons why food plagiarism is so hard to prove: a recipe that is a list of ingredients cannot be copyrighted. Nor can a traditional cooking method be seen as the property of any author. Reproducing these, therefore, is not plagiarism.

However, substantial literary and artistic expressions are copyrightable, according to the US Copyright Office, and reproducing these is unlawful. Another suspect action is when a chef’s work is tweaked by changing just one or two ingredients. In 2012, the Food Network in the US cancelled chef Anne Thornton’s TV show Dessert First, because some of her recipes were only mildly different from those created by superchefs like Martha Stewart.

Bloggers like Mitra Dalal lean on these definitions to call their content original. “Most of us have unique styles of writing, and we often include anecdotes and other content to our posts,” she said. “So copy-pastes can often be quite correctly identified.”

Another useful metric, according to Mitra Dalal, are rules set in more mature markets where bloggers have already fought, and won, battles.

“There are international guidelines for this,” she explained. “Loosely put, if every third word is different, the text cannot be deemed plagiarised. Also, you cannot say that an ingredient list is plagiarised.”

Small wins

Mitra Dalal and other food bloggers often fight their battles outside the court of law, which is good and bad. On the plus side, it’s faster and easier for them to control the context – but on the minus side, the wins are relatively small.

In July last year, for instance, 20 food bloggers alleged that the recipe aggregating app The Frying Pan had plagiarised their work. They lawyered up, and got ready for a legal battle.

“The Frying Pan had published our recipes and photographs without proper attribution, and without our consent,” said Deeba Rajpal, one of the 20 complainants. “We were advised that if we sought compensation, it would be a long haul. So, we only asked The Frying Pan to take our content down and never to use our work again without permission.”

The case didn’t go to court. The lawyers met and reached an agreement, according to Rajpal. “The app took our content down. The case never had a proper conclusion – it fizzled out.”

Except on social media, where the Food Bloggers’ Hall of Shame kept the pressure up, slamming The Frying Pan – hard.

Can Google help?

Proving plagiarism in food writing is difficult at any rate, but there are factors that complicate the matter in India, according to Sunil Abraham of The Centre for Internet and Society.

The copyright law here, he says, has inbuilt exceptions and limitations that protect the rights of stakeholders, including entrepreneurs, content creators, consumers, the public who may not pay for the content, and the government.

Many times, copyright holders in India have conceded or withdrawn legal cases because of limitations to the copyright law or the doctrine of fair use, which states that “brief excerpts of copyright material may, under certain circumstances, be quoted verbatim”. Just in February, a handful of publishers took back a lawsuit against a photocopier shop in Delhi University that had been selling study packs with materials reproduced from the publishers’ books.

Abraham said that often there is an economic incentive for plagiarising – take that away, and you fix half the problem.

For bloggers, a major source of income is Google AdSense, a popular program that allows website publishers to display ads on their pages and “earn money when visitors view or click the ads”. The problem is: if the advertiser cares only about page views and not the origin of the content, there is no incentive against plagiarism.

For checking online copyright infringement, Abraham says, the onus should be on multinationals like Google, which host a large number of blogs and web versions of media articles. “Google is constantly indexing the internet,” he said in a phone interview from Bengaluru, so Google knows when a write-up or a photo has been published before.

To be fair, according to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Google does entertain requests to remove online posts where a complainant can show copyright infringement. It’s a recourse that Mitra Dalal and some members of her Facebook group have found useful. But Abraham says this is less effective than if Google created hurdles to publishing content it deems plagiarised.

Need for reforms

Where does all this leave Saxena? It’s hard to tell.

Social media has generated awareness about his case, and Saxena has filed a complaint with the Delhi Police under Section 63 of the Indian Copyright Act. He plans to follow it up with a legal case. One thing that has certainly resulted from the episode is the food writing community’s intensified demand for clarity in laws to protect intellectual property.

As Saee Koranne-Khandekar, who blogs at myjhola.in, wrote on Food Bloggers’ Hall of Shame: “What’s amazing is that the original work [by Saxena and Bhatnagar] has gone through three successful editions, is published by a major player, and is written by two prominent names in the industry. One would think theft of content would occur in the case of less lesser known works, but this is pure guts! I hope at least this incident marks the immediate need for reform in our laws.”

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/a2k/news/scroll-july-4-2017-chanpreet-khurana-plagiarism-is-rampant-in-indian-food-writing-but-finally-bloggers-have-a-way-to-fight-it

Placements at NUJS: Class of 2017 Scores 100%

praskrishna — 2017-06-12T01:23:07Z

The Campus Recruitment Committee of the Class of 2017, NUJS is proud to confirm that NUJS has once again topped the placement tally among the premier national law schools, in terms of number of jobs, for the year 2016-17 with the graduating class having secured offers for all its 78 members who partook in the recruitment process.

The blog post by Simran Sahni was published in Livelaw on June 10, 2017.

The number of students hired by the domestic law firms on Day Zero with a tally totaling 57, inclusive of the 24 accepted pre-placement offers (PPOs).

The ‘Big 7’ firms contributed to 53 of these jobs and ICICI Bank recruited 4. New recruiters including Indus Partners and Singh & Associates hired from campus this year, picking three students each. Three students bagged offers from international law firms: Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters, and Allen & Overy respectively.

The salaries remain the same as last year with the average foreign firm package ranging from INR 38 lakhs to 44 lakhs for traineeships and the average domestic firm packages ranging from INR 8 lakhs to 18 lakhs. The firm with the highest domestic package was AZB and Partners, Mumbai.

Additionally, more than six students this year have decided to pursue higher education. Students have received admission offers in LLM from Harvard Law School, Cambridge Faculty of Law, NYU Faculty of Law, London School of Economics and Graduate Institute Geneva respectively. Charting new courses, while one student opting for a master’s in management has been offered admission at the renowned London Business School, another joined as a policy officer at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore. Interestingly, even the topper of the class opted out of placements this year and set a new record by being the third in the line of scholars from NUJS to secure the prestigious Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University. Similarly, students have also decided to take up the meritorious one year Young India Fellowship program at Ashoka University.

With the current placement figures, NUJS beats all market trends to secure the highest number of job offers among premier law schools. The Class of 2017 also marginally trumps the record of the Class of 2016 in terms of total number of ‘Big 7’ jobs, even with a large chunk of the batch opting out of campus recruitment and pursing litigation, higher education, civil and judicial services and roles in think tanks and other non-profit organization's - the results of which shall be released by us as and when they come.

This entire feat would not have been possible without the support of the respected Vice Chancellor, Prof. P. Ishwara Bhat, CRC team and faculty advisor Ms. Vaneeta Patnaik, and all the faculty members at NUJS.

NUJS has built an exceedingly steady placement record for itself over the years. The placement figures for the Class of 2017 of NUJS are now live on the website here.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/livelaw-june-10-2017-simran-sahni-placements-at-nujs

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praskrishna — 2012-08-06T15:35:51Z

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Place for a safety net

praskrishna — 2016-07-13T02:45:56Z

Vinupriya took her life last week, humiliated by the morphed images of her naked body posted on a social media site. Experts warn that the spike in Internet traffic brings with it an increase in online sexual crimes. Measures must be taken urgently to save lives, they tell T.V. Jayan.

The article was published in the Telegraph on July 10, 2016.

Sangeeta (not her name) was 25 and working for a private company in Mumbai when she suddenly told her family that she was going to quit her job and stay at home. Her parents were flummoxed, but questioning and coaxing yielded no answers. As the days rolled on, the management graduate slipped into depression. Her worried family took her to a counsellor. And it was only then that she came out with her story.

Soon after she joined the company, Sangeeta got romantically involved with her boss. By the time she learnt he was married, the involvement had taken a physical turn. And when she tried to put an end to it, the man, who had recorded their intimate moments, used the video clips to blackmail her for sexual favours. After Sangeeta's confession and a police complaint, the blackmailing boss was nabbed and put behind bars.

Vinupriya, an undergraduate student from Salem, Tamil Nadu, was not so lucky. She found that her morphed images had been uploaded on Facebook. She committed suicide last week after her parents refused to believe her story, and the police failed to act swiftly.

Cyber experts are alarmed by the increase in online crimes against women in India. According to them, what is more worrying is that though the risks are catastrophic, the issues are not being addressed at a larger level.

"Vinupriya's case is particularly frightening. I suspect this would be the first of many such tragedies. They might even result in honour killings, as such crimes can destroy the reputation of families," says American cyber lawyer Parry Aftab, executive director of the voluntary organisation, Wired Safety, which she founded 20 years ago, and which deals extensively with cyber stalking and other crimes.

Earlier this week, a man was arrested in Delhi for sending obscene messages to more than 1,500 women in the National Capital Region. According to the police, the miscreant would randomly dial any number and if the caller turned out to be a woman, he would save the number and later check out her WhatsApp profile picture. He would then send obscene clips to the woman. One news report said some of the marriages were in trouble because husbands had seen the messages and suspected that their wives were in a relationship with the man sending those explicit messages.

Aftab has been studying the dangers of online stalking for a while. There are no figures on this in India, but a top United Nations official, stationed in New Delhi and dealing with trafficking, told her that about 500 rape and sexual assault cases were recorded and shared over WhatsApp in India this year.

She referred to a study conducted in the US that said one in three girls and boys engaged in sexting. Children involved in sexting contemplated suicide three times more than others of the same age, she said.

According to her, Wired Safety volunteers come across five cases of sextortion and sexting every day from Asian countries, including India, and act upon them by red-flagging social media organisations where such images are posted.

Pavan Duggal, a cyber lawyer based in Delhi, feels that social media service providers are not doing enough to stop online sexual abuse. "They are hiding behind a 2015 Supreme Court judgment, which said content can be removed only on judicial orders or in response to government notifications," he says.

The verdict he refers to was delivered in a case filed by a student called Shreya Singhal. In 2012, two girls were arrested over their Facebook post questioning the Mumbai shutdown for Shiv Sena patriarch Bal Thackeray's funeral. The incident made an impression on Singhal, a student of astrophysics at the University of Bristol, who was in India at the time.

Upon research she discovered that Section 66(A) of India's IT Act was subjective and any seemingly offensive social media post could land anyone in jail. Singhal filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court protesting that the section violated the constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression, and in 2015, the apex court ruled in her favour.

This judgment, however, emboldened cyber miscreants. "All the cyber bullies and cyber stalkers now have a misplaced feeling that nothing can happen to them," says Duggal. He points out that while the delivery of justice takes time, the harassment happens 24x7.

"Who do the victims turn to for help? There are provisions in the 2011 IT rules that clearly say that social medial service providers should have rules and regulations in place to deal with objectionable content, but they do not act," he holds.

Aftab, however, believes that some efforts are in place. She cites the example of Microsoft's PhotoDNA technology, which is used by many social media and online search firms, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, to prevent child pornography on the Internet. PhotoDNA works by creating a number of mini hashes on a single image and combining them to have a full hash. If anything is changed, even a pixel, then the hash signature will not match.

But she holds that on a larger scale, it is difficult to technologically deal with revenge porn, sextortion (using a sexual or provocative image to blackmail people for sexual favours) and sexting (sharing sexually provocative images of people, especially women) with the intention of damaging reputation.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, hints at a lack of initiative on the part of the social media organisations. "When it comes to enforcing intellectual property, organisations like Facebook do an excellent job of keeping their platform free of copyright infringement," he says. "So, clearly these companies can police activities on their platform when it affects their bottom-line."

And while this debate continues, more and more Indians join the online experience, thereby increasing the chances of more such cases. Aftab, who plans to set up a voluntary organisation relating to cyber safety in India, says it is best to focus on proactive measures in the interim.

Last month, she addressed 1,200 teenage girls from a Bangalore college. "One of the first questions posed to me was from a young girl who said she was currently being blackmailed by someone who threatened to morph her pictures into sexually explicit images and send them to her family and others. Morphed image issue seems to be a lot more serious in India than in the West."

The problem, she stresses, is that such incidents can lead to self-harm. To counter this, the affected person needs to inform his or her family and enlist their support. Together, they should approach social media organisations to ensure that the objectionable content is removed in time. To prevent the offenders from doing further harm, they then need to take the help of law enforcement agencies.

"The government for its part must amplify the voices of women and hold these Internet corporations accountable for an information escrow. There should be an independent mechanism to monitor whether Internet platforms are taking complaints from women seriously," Abraham says. Only then can a young girl like Vinupriya pluck up the courage to fight online abuse.

For more details visit http://editors.cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-telegraph-july-10-2016-place-for-a-safety-net