The article was originally published in Boom Live. Read here. The petitions seeking recognition of same-sex marriage had reached their ninth day of hearing in the Supreme Court. The case, being a matter of constitutional importance, was being live-streamed on YouTube. The petitioners had already made their arguments as to why the court should recognise the…
This article was originally published on Boomlive. MEITY blocks information requests citing national security and the requirement to maintain “strict confidentiality”. A Delhi high court case may help change practices around internet censorship in India. On March 31 this year, Kalim Ahmed, a journalist by profession, received an email from Twitter with the subject line “Twitter Notice of…
The article was originally published in Boom Live. Read here. Deepa*, a 40-year-old doctor from Delhi was horrified when she got a WhatsApp message of her face morphed into an obscene picture earlier this year. “It was a disconcerting experience,” she told Decode narrating her experience of receiving harassing calls and messages from a loan recovery…
The article was originally published in Boom Live. Read here. Editor’s Note: For our Decode Voices section, we will be documenting personal experiences with the Internet and online platforms. Technology, privacy, law and policy will be touched upon through these stories. My phone buzzed. It was one of the many notifications on my Twitter that I…
The article was originally published in Boom Live. Read here. The central government has proposed some changes to India’s hallmark transparency law, the Right to Information Act (RTI), 2005 which has raised concerns and criticism. The changes are sought to be done via the proposed Digital Personal Data Protection Bill (DPDP), 2022 which will bring in…
The article was originally published in Boom Live. Read here. In 2017, while delivering the landmark Right to Privacy judgement, a Supreme Court of India judge said, “Humans forget, the Internet does not, and does not let humans forget.” Justice SK Kaul ruled that the right of an individual to exercise control over personal data and…
The article was originally published in Boom. Read here. On a usual morning in September 2020, Tribhuvan, a daily wage labourer who lives in a village called Umari in Maharashtra, logged on to Facebook. As he scrolled through his feed, a catchy advertisement offering massive discounts on shoes, belts, and goggles caught his attention. The…
The article was originally published in Boom. Read here. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MEITY) recently told the Parliament in July that it had issued 1,122 orders to block Twitter content till June this year. In 2021, this figure stood at 2,851 — against 2,731 in 2020 and 1,041 in 2019 — showing…
The article was originally published in Boom. Read here. The arrest of Mohammed Zubair, journalist and co-founder of a fact-checking news website Alt News has sparked outrage not only on the issue of falling press freedom in India, but also on the issue of data privacy. On June 27, Zubair was arrested by the Delhi…