Advocacy

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:

This policy brief deals with the principles and framework to govern aggregate non-personal data as 'common pool resources'. Such an intervention is necessary in view of the large dividends acquired through the use of such data, the widespread de facto collection of data and its potential as a raw material for the development of Artificial…

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)…

During a global discussion led by Brazil in 2014, India maintained that the internet is not merely an open, free, global commons that should remain untouched by major governmental control, but also a resource that needs to reflect the values of an ‘Equinet’ – a platform for commerce, e-governance, national security mechanism, to be achieved…

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…

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…

There are two ways to look at the digital economy.  One is just as progressive automation of production processes that has been going on for many years, now hitting a whole new level.  Another is to see it as a distinct discontinuity, much like the industrial revolution was.  The latter, within a few decades of some rapid techno-economic…

….. The second type of education system ties the teacher to the prescribed textbook. She is given no choice in the organization of curriculum, pacing, and the mode of final assessment. Textbooks are prescribed for each subject, and the teacher is expected to elucidate the text, lesson by lesson in the given order. She must ensure that children…

We need to move towards a new legal framework for surveillance

Over the past decade, we have been witness to many legal, juridical and executive interventions that comprise the highly contentious terrain of surveillance in digital times — from the amendment to Section 69 of the IT Act in 2008 that expanded the government’s powers of…

For long, Internet activists considered the Internet as being beyond law, politics and governments. J.P. Barlow made the famous Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace in 1996. It was fine when this phenomenon was just shaping up and challenging established institutions. But with the Internet and data becoming central to new social and…