Anita Gurumurthy

Technologies that map women’s bodies and reproductive choices are a site of patriarchal control and surveillance while simultaneously creating an illusion of choice or autonomy for users. This report recognizes and examines the ways in which the absence of safeguards for sensitive and personal data and information disproportionately targets…

The platform model has emerged as a game changing force, transforming economic activity across key sectors. Platformization as the process of such a shift towards new modes of production and exchange serves as the pièce de résistance of global economic organization in the…

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…

Digital and data technologies are not merely tools or enablers of development; they are the scaffolds of a new social paradigm. As data flows through a more and more interconnected planet, the capture of network-data spaces by corporate and state interest recasts opportunity structures, heightening inequalities between, and within, countries.…

Progress towards every single sustainable development goal (SDG) of Agenda 2030 also hinges on the effective deployment of digital technologies. In Global Governance Spotlight 4|2019, Anita Gurumurthy and Nandini Chami from IT for Change explain the importance of so-called digital ecosystems to catalyse inclusive sustainable development. In…

Going by the chapter on data in the Economic Survey released on July 4, it seemed that the government’s new Budget would carry new thinking on the digital economy. If data of, for, and by, the people was going to be an important digital mantra, then the Budget had to build on this. However, the BJP government’s digital imaginary, read in the…

Earlier this week, Facebook deleted over 700 pages in India for “coordinated inauthentic behaviour” and “spam”. Most of these pages were related to the Congress and the BJP. The action, evidently with an eye on the upcoming elections, targeted what Facebook described as deliberate attempts to mislead. Facebook’s role in cleaning up mala fide…

Every once in a while, there is the high optics drama about a woman celebrity or public persona who has been trolled, and then, predictably, the dust settles. But make no mistake. This is but the proverbial tip of an iceberg that is ballooning.

The internet-mediated world presents a contradiction of a magnitude and complexity that…

In October and November 2018, during the Great Indian Festival season in India, online retail giants — Amazon, Flipkart and Paytm Mall — sold goods worth $4.3 billion (Rs 29,947 crore), 43% higher than the last year.

Traders in physical retail must now reckon with the rather disconcerting reality of e-commerce. The press note issued by…

Reorienting "data for development"

"Data for development" enjoys high currency in global policy circles. It has come to stand for the idea that developing countries need to acquire the capacity to produce "quality, accessible, timely and reliable disaggregated data" and use the promise of big data to…