Supreme Court of India hears the WhatsApp-Facebook Data Sharing Case: The special leave petition against the Delhi High Court’s ruling upholding WhatsApp’s updated privacy policy came up for hearing before a bench of five judges today. This policy is contentious because it allows WhatsApp to share valuable personal information of its users, including phone numbers,…
Online abuse a modern-day weapon to silence women: Barkha Dutt: I have been called a whore, a ‘randi’, ‘c***”, bitch and ‘presstitute” on Twitter and other social media platforms so often that now I barely notice it. It is not unusual for me to get tweets that go like this: “Tum agar randi bhi ban…
India’s ‘Phone Romeos’ Look for Ms. Right via Wrong Numbers: LUCKNOW, India — In a glass-sided call center, police constables clicketyclack on computer keyboards, on the trail of a particularly Indian sort of criminal. The “phone Romeo,” as he is known here, calls numbers at random until he hears a woman’s voice, in the hope…
Man Sacked After Rana Ayyub Posts His Abusive Messages on Twitter: Bincylal Balachandran, 31, who worked with Alpha Paints in Dubai as a customer service employee was reportedly sacked when complaints of his behaviour reached his employers. According to Gulf News, social media users who were enraged by his messages brought it to the company’s attention on…
Aadhaar robust; the poor have no complaints about it: Ravi Shankar Prasad: Union Minister for Law and Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad tells The Hindu that nobody is being denied any benefit for not having Aadhaar and fears on that count are misplaced. Read More
Why government wanting to regulate Facebook and WhatsApp may not be a bad thing: Citing the fact that there are no regulatory norms to address privacy concerns of users of Over The Top (OTT) messaging services such as WhatsApp, Skype, Facebook etc, the government has informed the Supreme Court on Wednesday, April 5, that it would soon…
The right to privacy: a digital disconnect: The question of a right to digital privacy never seems far from the news headlines. In the last month, for example, FBI director James Comey told the press that the American people have no right to what he called ‘absolute privacy’. Read More
Facebook adds tools to block revenge porn on the platform: In a public post on the platform, Facebook co-founder, Mark Zukerberg wrote: “Today we’re rolling out new tools to prevent “revenge porn” from being shared on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram… It’s wrong, it’s hurtful, and if you report it to us, we will now use AI…
Will regulate WhatsApp and other messaging services: Centre tells SC: The government was responding to a PIL filed in the SC questioning Whatsapp’s privacy policy. The petition filed by Karmanya Singh Sareen claimed “Over The Top (OTT) services are governed in some respect by the provisions of Information Technology Act, 2000 and are not subject to the…
A response to Nandan Nilekani on Aadhaar (Updated): Claim 1 from Nandan Nilekani: When seeding and authentication are done properly, the success rate is over 95 per cent. Response: This is useless at the scale in which Aadhaar is implemented. When a person wants their monthly quota of rations, they are usually asked to provide…