Advocacy

IT for Change contributed to the U.S. Copyright Office's call for comments in relation to AI and copyrights. Our input spoke to the significant issues and challenges around consumption and utilization of knowledge – both public and copyrighted – in relation to the developments in the field of AI, and generative AI in particular. Our submission…

Anita Gurumurthy and Deepti Bharthur responded to a call for papers on Global AI Governance by UN Tech Envoy’s office for the first meeting of the Multistakeholder Advisory Body on AI in September 2023.

This paper builds on some key threads from a roundtable on ‘Reframing AI governance through a political economy lens’, convened in June…

Imagine you joined a course without knowing that the instruction was in Russian. You would understand nothing. In a poignant scene from the Hindi movie, Taare Zameen Par, the parents of Ishaan, who is dyslexic, are asked to read Chinese and learn. They struggle and fail. This is what happens to thousands of Indian…

IT for Change submitted an input to the UN Human Rights B-Tech project in response to its call for inputs on gender, digital tech, and the role of business, using the lens of the United Nations Guiding Principles of Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) applied from a gender perspective. In our submission, firstly, we highlighted the important to…

In the May 2023 meeting of the Regulatory Working Group of the Coalition against Online Violence, Malavika Rajkumar and Merrin Muhammed Ashraf presented comments on the 2018 UNHRC Resolution on Violence against Women and Girls in the Digital Contexts, highlighting certain gaps and deficits in the objective and language of the Resolution that…

In this paper, the authors argue that there is substantial scope for data governance policies for the Global South to draw from theories and practices informed by the idea that data can be a subject of decentralized, community-centric governance. First, the paper highlights the importance of recognizing communities and groups as agents with…

As procurers of all the civic tech that surrounds us, municipal authorities today find themselves in a unique position — they have become the custodians of personal and aggregate data generated by the world’s largest human concentrations. Rich or poor, large or small, democratic, autocratic, or otherwise, cities — mostly in the Global South —…

In the last few years, data has been likened, aside from the hackneyed comparison to ‘oil’, to any number of tangible entities such as mineral deposits, dividend deposits, and even the Alaskan Permanent Fund. Metaphors as a tool could re-entrench existing power asymmetries or resist them, depending on how they impact and influence our…

The Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act of 2023 has rightly been criticised for failing to uphold good consent and data subject rights. One provision that has been largely overlooked is Section 16, which pertains to the transfer and processing of personal data outside India. Section 16 permits data fiduciaries to transfer personal data…

A data-propelled tendency for economic concentration and the policy deficits that have fueled the rise of Big Tech companies have brought to the fore a critical realization – market power is coterminous with data power and the entrenched control of Big Tech over the data value chains is at the heart of the problem of economic inequality. The…