IT for Change's Nandini Chami appeared on BBC Newshour on the 31st birthday of the World Wide Web to talk about the scale of online gender-based violence and the ways in which the web seems to be failing women and girls. The highlights of the discussion were as follows:
As IT for Change's previous research has already demonstrated, women…Media articles
2020
The human body is asserting itself more than as a performative spectacle on the streets. From Hong Kong to India, Catalonia, Lebonan, Chile and many more, the body is a signifier of bio-power and hope, defeating surveillance, courting arrest and deliberately seeking the system’s panoptic gaze.
The proliferation of protests suggests a…
2020
The glass is half full.
Voices of resistance to power are everywhere. Students and young people are taking to the streets; women are infiltrating public discourse; and the unlikely activist is joining popular uprisings. Social movements are rejecting tokenism and ‘woke-washing’ from corporations, demanding that governments deal with the…
2020
Since at least 2012, tech firms have consistently topped the list of companies in terms of market capitalisation, indicating the enormous financial power that the business of data wields. At the same time, governments around the world – including in South Asia – have been harvesting their citizens’ personal data and perfecting methods of…
2020
Four centuries after the East India Company set the trend for corporate resource extraction, most of the world is now in the grip of unbridled corporate power. But corporate power is on the cusp of achieving ‘quantum supremacy’ that social movements in the digital age need to understand in order to shift gears in their struggles. The quantum…
2020
Anonymisation of data is neither a corollary of privacy protection nor is it an oxymoron to the idea of privacy. Instead, it is more likely a gateway to a possible privacy breach which has not been addressed in the government’s Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019 .
The Bill which is heralded as a much-needed safeguard to rein in the…
2019
The United States’ blacklisting of the Chinese company Huawei — since reversed — represents an important milestone as the world splits digitally around its two digital superpowers, the US and China. Last year, the US disallowed Alibaba’s takeover of Moneygram and later embargoed US supplies to the mobile company ZTE. Amazon and Google recently…
2019
This article was first published in Firstpost.
A mass exodus from Twitter over to open-source microblogging community Mastodon is in the news, and it’s not the first time that users have responded to social media’s opaque content moderation policies in this way. Calls to #deletefacebook abounded after the Cambridge Analytica scandal…
2019
“In your opinion, what is the most prevalent problem faced by the residents of your area?” three of us from IT for Change, asked the youth of Old Baiyappanahalli a few months ago.
It didn’t take long for the youth to unanimously respond – the traffic at the railway gate, which had been the bane of their existence.
“It’s becoming…
2019
Last week, Facebook announced Libra, its new currency based on blockchain technology.
This development that has been met with mixed reactions. Unlike Bitcoin, Libra will be backed by a reserve of a basket of currencies. Both the technology and the reserve are governed by the Libra Association, which includes a host of technology…