Article
The Privacy Conundrum: How to secure your data by saying ‘no’ to apps
The sheer amount of data collected is enough to have a reasonable amount of privacy concern. While the draft Data Protection regulation tries to tackle the issue from the supply-side perspective, in this article we discuss how can we secure our privacy from the demand-side by carrying out certain practices and using tools.
Principles, Not Government’s Discretion, Can Fix Social Media
According to the IT Rules 2021, the government can order social media platforms to take down any content which they determine to be unlawful. This paves the way for unaccountable censorship. The government should be drafting objective principles and guidelines instead of such ad hoc censorship.
How to Fight Electoral Fake News on Social Media
During the 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter flagged fake news through fact-checking. But despite these efforts, the U.S. Capitol was attacked, owing to widespread belief in false propaganda and misinformation. India has lessons to learn from this experience.
Blog Post
The state of surveillance in India: National security at the cost of privacy?
As India makes rapid technological advancements, should it rethink its regulatory framework governing surveillance?
Why Do We Need Surveillance Reform in India? – Recent developments
While surveillance as a craft has a long-standing history, recent technological developments in the country have transformed the surveillance construct into one that is intrusive and disturbs the democratic safeguards. In this post, I explore recent developments in India regarding various forms of surveillance that call for robust reform.
How to tackle dis/misinformation to contain vaccine hesitancy?
While India is predicted to be moving towards yet another COVID-19 surge (third wave), experts believe expediating the vaccination process could help us from ill effects In this post, I list out various measures to be taken to tackle dis/misinformation on social media to curb vaccine hesitancy.
Interoperability and Portability as a Lever to Enhance User Choice and Privacy in Messaging Platforms
This post discusses the importance of interoperative and portability amongst the messaging platform for tackling monopoly, which, in turn, help in enhancing user outcomes such as user choice and privacy. This post also discusses the enablers, legislative reimagining, and structural changes required in terms of technology to enable interoperability and portability amongst the messaging platforms.
Can intermediary regulation fix the broken social media?
Recently, the Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology notified IT Rules, 2021. Can these rules fix the broken social media?
Demand-side Measures for Tackling Electoral Disinformation and Misinformation on Social Media
In this blog post, I provide some demand-side measures for tackling electoral disinformation and misinformation on social media to ensure users are aware and equipped to check the integrity of the information.
An Elephant in the Room – Recent Case of WhatsApp Fallout Amongst Indian Users
In this blog post, I examine the issue of privacy in-depth to understand whether some of the users’ concerns highly regarded post the WhatsApp notification are only related to a particular App or an uptick in taking cognisance of the overall concerns of privacy, in general.
Book Review
Book Review: Community Radio Policies in South Asia: A Deliberative Policy Ecology Approach
In this book review, I elaborate on how history has shaped the current media policy landscape in these four South Asian countries.
Research Paper/Report
Harmonising the UK and India Data Protection Regime
This report discusses a roadmap for interoperability and harmonisation between the UK and India’s data protection regimes, enabling cross border data transfers.
Let’s think global: Social Media Commission – A Federated
Model for Governance
This paper tries to answer this question by proposing a global governance body called Social Media Commission (SMC). The proposed structure will have international, country-level, district or state-level bodies (accounting for pluralistic users and input legitimacy), which will work in synergy and work in bottom-up approach.
Falling Short on Legitimacy: Rift in the DCNs Governance Frameworks (in the process)
This paper will try to analyse the prominent DCNs governance frameworks using the democratic legitimacy lens. Further, this paper will try to score DCNs governance frameworks using formulated Democratic Legitimacy Index to see how legitimate they are
Draft e-Commerce Policy: Identifying Gaps and Uncertainties
In 2019, the Indian government released a draft e-Commerce bill that would get to the parliament soon, but there are lots of gaps and misses in the draft. Understanding the complexity of the issue in hand, this paper tries to map the misses in the draft to the status quo and provides a list of recommendations for intervention.
Kamesh Shekar 