privacy

IT for Change’s portal 'Judicial Resource Guide on Forging a Survivor-Centric Approach to Online Gender-Based Violence' serves as a tool for judges and lawyers to acquire a comprehensive understanding of gendered cyberviolence and to discover rights-based and survivor-focused solutions within the legal framework. The portal is organized into…

Data is almost universally recognised as the most valuable economic resource today. Seven out of the top 10 companies globally by market capitalisation are data-centric. In these circumstances, it appears strange that there has hardly been any worthwhile attempt to look at who has economic rights to various kinds of data, and how these rights…

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…

The Srikrishna Committee report on data protection (2018) is based on the fundamental belief that a legal framework for the protection of personal data is imperative for empowerment, progress and innovation in the 21st century.

In the words of Justice Chandrachud in Justice KS Puttaswamy (Retd.) vs Union of India (2017), the “(f)…

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…

On December 20, 2018, the Union Ministry of Home Affairs issued an order authorizing ten central agencies to intercept, monitor and decrypt any information generated from any computer, drawing legitimacy from the Information Technology Act (2000) and associated rules. It is not clear if the order intends to be an executive fiat for blanket…

The Just Net Coalition (JNC) has sent an open letter to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, voicing its objection to World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) official recommendation of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). The use of EME, developed by W3C, poses a risk to billions of people's security and privacy, and restricts their access to…

In our response to the timely consultation paper by TRAI on  Privacy, Security and Ownership of the Data in the Telecom Sector we advocate for a broad spectrum of safeguarded data including 'collective/social data' in light of its commercial value. The paper recognizes that consent based ownership frameworks are inadequate for various reasons…

Privacy is no longer just about non-interference from the State but an urgent imperative in the age of digital where citizen data protection is vulnerable to incomplete legal safeguards. Read more on this in our take on the Aadhaar Act in First Post.

This article examines the new concerns for privacy emerging in the age of data-based governance, using the UID/Aadhaar scheme in India as a case in point.