Media articles

How are booking platforms changing  the global tourism industry and the tourism value chain? Who are the big winners in the platformization of the Indian tourism industry and who is missing out? Does the integration of local tourism businesses into digital booking platforms democratise and  balance economic power structures by allowing for a…

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:

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

“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…